He started the truck. Some of them needed fixing. Did you fix them? That part's still going on. She nodded in the way she had the solemn small nod of a person taking in information and filing it correctly.
I drew another airplane last night, she said. For my portfolio. He looked at her as he pulled out of the school lot. Your portfolio. I'm making a portfolio of drawings.
Mrs. Delgado says artists keep portfolios. Mrs. Delgado is right. I'm going to put the airplane and a horse and the drawing of our kitchen. The one with me burning the grilled cheese. You look very realistic in it.
He laughed. It came out easier than he expected, which told him something about how tired he'd actually been. The laugh loosen loosened something that had been held tight for a week. They stopped for groceries on the way home. He needed eggs and bread and the particular brand of apple juice that Mia had strong opinions about.
While they were in the produce section, she talked him into a pineapple on the grounds that she had never had a fresh pineapple, and it seemed like something a person should try at least once. He agreed that this was reasonable. His phone buzzed in his pocket twice while they were in the checkout line. He didn't look at it. He looked at it when Mia was in the in the other room.
Two texts from Vanessa sent 40 minutes apart. The first board meeting went longer than expected. Call me when you can. The second I told them all of it. The regulatory report goes in tonight.
He stood in the kitchen for a moment reading the texts twice. Then he called her. She picked up on the second ring. How bad was it? He asked.
Define bad. Her voice was tired in a way he hadn't heard from her before. were not defeated, but stripped of the operational layer she usually maintained. What was underneath it was still recognizably her. Just closer to the surface, three board members told me I was being reckless. One told me I was being naive.
The legal counsel said I was exposing the company to greater liability by self-reporting than by managing it privately. What did you say to that? I said that the maintenance contractor's practices had put aircraft in the air that could have killed people. that the aviation authorities's ability to embed and potentially prevent the same practices at other operators depended on accurate reporting and that I was not going to make a decision about whether to report a safety issue based on my company's litigation's exposure. Caleb leaned against the kitchen counter. The legal counsel, Vanessa continued, then told me that my judgment appeared to have been influenced by an outside contractor whose objectivity could not be verified. me, meaning you a brief pause.
I told him that was the most accurate thing he'd said all afternoon. Caleb was quiet for a moment. Are you going to be all right? The company financially probably. It'll be a difficult 12 months.
She paused. The board is scared. Scared people make aggressive arguments, but they're also rational, most of them. Once the authority investigation is underway and the maintenance contractor's practices are formally documented, the liability picture actually looks better for Sterling Aviation as the self-reporting party than it would look for a company that was found to have known and stayed quiet. The legal counsel knows that, too.
Of course, he does. He was arguing for the settlement because settlements are how his firm makes money. Board members were arguing for containment because containment is what they understand. None of them were arguing in bad faith. She paused.
They were just arguing for something other than the most important thing. He thought about Derek telling him. The diagnostic screens showed Green the specific confidence of a man whose instruments were telling him what he wanted to hear. Sir, he said yes. After the authority investigation is done, after the maintenance overhaul, when the aircraft are actually airworthy, he stopped organized the thought.
You're going to need a different maintenance framework than what you had. Just a different contractor, a different set of standards for how inspections are conducted and documented and verified. I'd like to help you build it if you want that. A pause longer than her usual pauses. Is that an offer?
She asked. It's an offer. You have a business? Routine inspections, emergency callouts. I have a business that pays my bills, he said.
What I'm describing would be a different arrangement. What kind of arrangement are you thinking about? He'd been thinking about it for 2 days since the night he'd called her from the fifth hangar and she'd told him about her father flying on the Falcon 8X. He hadn't planned to say anything yet. He hadn't finished deciding if it was the right thing to propose, but the board meeting had happened and the report was going in tonight and the work was real.
And what he'd spent the past week doing was exactly the kind of work that needed to be ongoing. Not a crisis response, but a structural practice. You need a chief of maintenance safety, he said. Someone with full authority to ground aircraft, require reinspection, reject maintenance documentation that doesn't meet standard. someone who reports to you and not to the operations director. So there's no institutional pressure to massage findings to meet scheduling needs.
The silence on the line was substantial. That's a significant position, she said. Yes. It would require someone who could work with the regulatory authority, manage a maintenance team, and rebuild a compliance culture from the ground up. Yes.
And you're describing yourself. I'm describing the role. Whether you want me in it is your decision. Another pause. He heard her exhale slowly.