Hard copy. I thought you'd prefer it. Andre almost smiled. He took the document and unfolded it. He read it standing in the corridor.
Richard waited with the patience of someone who understands that this is not a moment to hurry. The review confirmed what Harris had said. Gerald's team had been negligent, not complicit, underresourced, undertrained for the volume of reports they were handling, and operating under a routing system that was structurally compromised in ways that predated Robert Caldwell. Gerald himself had missed things he should have caught. The review was clear about that.
It was also clear that he had not been working against the building. He had been working in a broken system that nobody had given him the tools to fix. Andre folded the document. "What happens to Gerald?" he said. "That's partly your call now," Richard said.
Andre looked at him. "You're the director of building security," Richard said. "Gerald's department falls under your operational oversight. What you recommend carries weight." Andre thought about Gerald in the executive elevator hallway making the phone call he didn't want to make.
Gerald standing at the security desk doing his job in a system nobody had properly resourced. Gerald who had not been the villain only a man who hadn't looked closely enough which was a different category of failure but a failure nonetheless. He stays Andre said but he gets retrained and his department gets the resources it should have had 3 years ago. new routing system, clear escalation protocols, and a direct line to my office for anything security adjacent that crosses his desk. Richard nodded. Done.
And he knows it came from me, Andre said. Not as a favor, as a condition. He needs to understand that this is a second chance and what the expectations are. I'll make sure he knows, Richard said. They stood in the sub-level corridor for a moment. the owner of a 3,200 person company and the man who had just been named to protect it standing in a basement in the fluorescent light in the place where the building's real life happened.
I want to ask you something, Richard said. Ask Andre said when you were walking out that morning when Clare told you to take your badge, what were you thinking? Andre was quiet for a moment. It was not a small question and it deserved a real answer. I was thinking about my daughter, he said. about her insurance, about her stability, about what losing this job would mean for the life I've built around making sure she has everything she needs."
He paused. "And then I was thinking about my wife, about what she would tell me to do. What would she have told you? She would have told me not to make a scene," Andre said. She'd have said, "Save your energy.
The truth doesn't need you to shout it. It just needs you to hold on until it gets a chance to speak." Richard absorbed that. She sounds, he said carefully, like she was remarkable. She was, Andre said, "Every day."