Derek Langford was arrested on a Wednesday. Gavin found out from a news alert on his phone, which he’d set up not because he wanted to follow the coverage, but because he’d been advised by the legal team to stay informed about public statements that might affect the investigation. The alert came through at 2:17 in the afternoon. He was in the middle of reviewing the inspection protocol for the second CS7 unit, and he looked at the notification, read it once, and put his phone face down on the desk. He sat with it for a minute. He’d thought in the years before this about what it would feel like when something actually happened, when the thing that had been done to him encountered consequences. He’d imagined it would feel large, cathartic maybe, in the way that movies suggested consequences felt. The satisfying thud of things falling into their proper places. It felt quieter than that. It felt like something releasing that he’d been holding so long he’d stopped knowing he was holding it. Not satisfaction exactly, more like the specific relief of putting down something heavy after you’ve been carrying it long enough that the weight had become so familiar you’d stopped registering it as a burden. He picked up his phone, turned it back over, and went back to the inspection protocol.
Philip Royce resigned from the board 8 days after the board meeting through a statement issued by his lawyers that used the particular passive voice constructions of someone describing their own wrongdoing as a series of things that had happened to them. He did not name Derek Langford specifically, which his lawyers had presumably advised, but the shape of the statement made clear enough that someone else had been the primary architect, and Royce had been a secondary beneficiary who’d convinced himself the money was clean because he’d kept sufficient distance from the details. Gavin read the statement and thought that it was probably at least partially true, that Royce had taken money from a structure he’d preferred not to examine too closely, and that he’d spent however many months since telling himself that not knowing the details was the same as not being responsible for them. He’d seen that particular self-deception before. It was common. It was the kind of thing that ordinary people in ordinary situations did. The moral arithmetic of looking at something you know isn’t quite right and calculating whether you can afford to know it more precisely. He didn’t feel charitable about it, but he understood the mechanism.
The three remaining CS7 aircraft were inspected over the following 2 weeks. Gavin led the inspections himself with Aldrich and the two outside engineers, and they found what he’d expected to find. The same TF90 configuration, the same calibration documentation issues, one unit with an additional discrepancy in the hydraulic system documentation that turned out to be a clerical error rather than a deliberate falsification, which he noted because accuracy was accuracy. All three aircraft were formally grounded pending component replacement and recertification. Sterling Crest Aviation issued a voluntary recall announcement, which was technically unnecessary since the aircraft hadn’t been delivered to customers yet, but which Marissa had insisted on anyway. She told Gavin when they discussed it that the announcement was the company saying out loud the thing that had been said privately, and that there was a difference between managing a crisis and actually accounting for one. He’d agreed with her. He’d told her so, which he gathered was not something she heard routinely from people who worked with her. Based on the slight surprise that crossed her face before she moved on.
6 weeks after the board meeting, Gavin started officially. His office was on the fourth floor of the headquarters building, which was a detail that amused him in a dry way. He’d been to this building twice in 3 years, both times to testify or present. And now he had a room in it with his name on a door plate that the facilities team had put up before he arrived, which meant someone had made the plate before he’d confirmed he was coming. And he didn’t know whether that was confidence or efficiency and had decided it was probably both. The office was larger than he needed. He asked facilities to bring him a smaller desk from storage and move the big one out, which produced a brief diplomatic difficulty because the large desk was apparently considered an executive perk. And the facilities coordinator wasn’t sure if voluntarily downsizing your desk was something that was done. Gavin said it was done now, and the smaller desk arrived the next afternoon. He kept the office otherwise plain, a whiteboard, his printed inspection reports in a binder on the shelf, a photograph of Mia on the desk, the one from last Christmas where she was laughing at something off camera and her hair was partially in her face and it was objectively not a good photograph by any technical measure, but it was the most accurate picture he had of what she actually looked like when she was just herself. He put nothing else on the walls. He thought about it and decided he didn’t need the walls to mean something. The work meant something.
On his second week, one of the company’s engineers, a young woman named Priya, who’d been on the CS7 program since its early stages, came to his office door and stood there for a moment before knocking. He’d noticed her during the inspection process, the way she worked, the questions she asked, the specific hesitation that showed up sometimes when she was answering questions about documentation she’d had contact with. “Come in,” he said. She came in. She sat down across from him without being asked, which he took as a good sign. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “About the third safety communication,