Bennett requested a 72-hour delay before any vote insisting on an in-person operational review of the Denver plant and Graham granted it immediately despite Reed's objections since Bennett's veto authority made resistance pointless. Sloan assumed Bennett was punishing her for the insult at the hotel and followed him into the hallway demanding he separate his personal feelings from company business. Bennett told her plainly that he had never brought anything personal into that boardroom and that it was her own embarrassment clouding her judgment, not his. At the plant, Bennett skipped the executive reception entirely, put on standard protective gear, walked straight onto the production floor, and greeted long-time workers by name, a familiarity that startled Sloan far more than anything he had said in the boardroom. He stopped at a welding station to ask an older technician about his knee surgery and paused near a break room to inquire whether the coffee machine had ever been repaired, small exchanges that told Sloan he had not simply memorized briefing packet before arriving.
She followed a few paces behind him. Increasingly aware that the workers responded to him with an ease they never showed her, not out of disrespect toward her, but because Bennett had clearly spent real hours among them rather than reviewing them as line items on a budget sheet. She soon learned that Bennett had spent six months living near that very plant during the original rescue years earlier and that he understood its production lines, its contracts, and its operational weaknesses better than most of the executives currently drawing salaries from it. Marshall Boone, the plant's long-time floor manager, showed Bennett a stack of rejected maintenance requests revealing that a critical temperature control system had been broken for weeks because the finance department refused to approve funding for repairs. Meanwhile, Reed continued telling the board the plant was running at 96% efficiency, a number Sloan began to realize had been quietly manufactured rather than measured.
She pulled up the same efficiency reports on her own tablet as they walked the floor, cross-referencing timestamps against the actual output she could see with her own eyes, and the gap between the numbers and reality grew wider with every station they passed. She started noticing that much of the data she had used to defend the merger no longer matched what she was seeing with her own eyes. Yet, pride kept her arguing with Bennett anyway, insisting he could afford to play the hero because he no longer carried the daily burden of running anything. Bennett did not raise his voice. He simply suggested she ask the first 10 workers she passed what they actually thought about the merger.
Those workers told her they had been asked to train an outside team without being informed that the very team they were training would soon replace them entirely. When Sloan checked the paperwork, she found her own electronic signature attached to that training plan, though Reed had presented it to her only as a routine staffing expansion. Bennett did not mock her confusion. He told her plainly that the greater failure was not being deceived in the first place, but continuing to defend a lie after the evidence had already been placed in front of her. Sloan began cross-checking documents alongside him, and her analytical instincts impressed Bennett more than he expected, convincing him she was not a careless heiress, but someone who had simply trusted the wrong people for far too long.