bay because protecting his dignity had seemed more urgent than arguing. Now he wondered whether silence would allow somebody else to define the reason he was unemployed.
Dale's number appeared on his phone at 6:40. Owen let it ring once more than necessary, then answered. "I'm not calling to ask you back," Dale said immediately. "I want to make that clear.
There's an outside engineer here with your notebook open, and she has questions we can't answer." Owen glanced through Hal's office window toward the fading sky. "Is the fleet held? All three yards?"
Dale confirmed it was. Owen exhaled slowly, the first relieved breath he had taken since leaving Blackwell. "Good," he said. "That's good."
Dale explained the fourteen work orders that had been closed without technical signoffs and acknowledged his own failure. "I should have stopped them yesterday morning. I should have said something while she was firing you. I didn't." Owen looked down at the phone.
"No," he said. "You didn't." The line remained quiet. It was not a cruel answer, but neither man mistook it for forgiveness. Dale had asked for honesty, and Owen was no longer prepared to smooth over the truth simply because the truth was uncomfortable.
"I'll answer the engineer's questions," Owen said eventually. "Tonight, as long as she needs. I'll do that for the drivers. But I'm not walking back in that building as a favor, and I'm not asking for my old job back."
Dale agreed. "That's fair." Owen leaned forward. "The lot marks are on the inside back cover.
I never got to the Dayton units. Somebody needs to get those records before they start making assumptions." Dale looked toward the conference room. "I'll tell her."
He handed the phone to Priya, who introduced herself and asked for the original sequence of symptoms rather than the executive summary. Owen spoke for two hours and ten minutes from his home garage, his phone on speaker beside a legal pad. He explained why the cold-weather reports stood out, what tests he had repeated, which valves he had removed, and how the supplier markings had begun to appear together. Priya challenged several assumptions and asked him to distinguish something directly measured from something he merely suspected. Owen appreciated the questions. He had spent months wanting somebody to ask them.
Near the end of the call, Priya asked about the adapter fitting. "Why did you buy it?" she said. "The gauge kit wouldn't fit the service port on 381," he answered. "The ordered adapter was nine days out, and I wanted to run the test before the truck came back on the schedule." Priya asked what would have happened if he had waited.
Owen looked at his old workbench, where he had placed the empty toolboxes he brought home. "I'd have tested 381 later," he said. "Maybe after it was sent on another load. And I might never have removed the valve that gave me the lot number."