Daniel thought about Amara's text, about the homework she was doing right now at the kitchen table, about Mrs. Peterson, who would be charging him double for a late night, about the dinner he'd promised to bring home. He thought about 3 years of maintenance uniforms and gas station coffee and worn composition notebooks filled with numbers that nobody read. He said, "What time, 8:00? I'll be there at 7:30." he said.
I want to read the board meeting materials before it starts. Victoria almost smiled. I'll have Clare send them tonight. Daniel nodded. He picked up his tool bag.
He walked to the door. He stopped. He turned back. He said, "One more thing." "Yes, the apology you're writing, the public one. It goes out tomorrow morning at 8.
I know Clare mentioned it." He paused. You don't need my permission for that, but I want you to know that I'm not asking for it. I never asked for an apology. I asked for the record to be corrected. Those are different things.
Victoria looked at him. I know they are, she said. The apology is because I owe it, not because you need it. He held her gaze for a moment. He said, good night, Miss Harrington.
Good night, Mr. Brooks. He left. She turned back to her desk. She looked at the patent application.
She picked up her pen. She sat there for a moment in the silence of a building that had emptied out around her while the day ran itself down. And she thought about the morning, about the moment she'd thrown that manual, about the rage and the humiliation and the 40 witnesses. And she felt something that she rarely allowed herself to feel in a professional context. She felt ashamed not of failing, not of the demonstration disaster or the investor crisis or any of the public consequences that had played out in full view of people whose opinion of her mattered professionally, those things she could carry.
She'd carried failures before. She felt ashamed of the manual, of the three words she'd shouted, of the specific cruelty of throwing a man's own work at him and telling him to read it. She sat with that for a while. Then she went back to work. It was 7:59 in the evening.