The numbers were serious. Northstar had lost market share, suffered expensive maintenance interruptions, and borrowed against nearly every attractive asset it owned. The company's aging reservation technology frustrated customers and frontline employees alike. Two seasonal route expansions had failed, fuel expenses had risen, and the board had spent the previous year arguing about layoffs as though cutting people were a substitute for repairing the decisions that had put those people at risk.
Summit Ridge's proposed rescue commitment totaled one hundred and twenty million dollars. The first twenty-five million would stabilize payroll and aircraft maintenance obligations under carefully controlled conditions. Subsequent funding would depend on operating disclosures, governance protections, and independent verification that the company was following the turnaround plan. The money was not a personal gift from Ethan, nor could he retract funds already disbursed simply because someone offended him. The power he held was contractual, meaningful, and constrained by responsibilities to his own investors and to the workers whose livelihoods depended on the airline surviving.
Ethan had insisted on those distinctions throughout the negotiations. He had seen too many firms enter struggling companies, demand dramatic cuts, then congratulate themselves for the efficiency of damage they had created. His approach was slower and less photogenic: fix maintenance planning, repair customer systems, negotiate credible lease schedules, and give employees stable processes instead of emergency instructions that changed with every executive phone call. A company could not become healthy by treating every person beneath the vice president level as disposable.
At six fifteen, Marilyn appeared in the doorway wearing a pale green cardigan and the same questioning expression she had used when Ethan came home late from school with a note folded in his pocket. "You were up before the kettle," she said. "Must be an expensive morning."
"Just another board meeting," he answered, knowing she would hear the missing truth in the word just.
Marilyn sat across from him and accepted the cup he slid her way. Her hands were bent slightly at the knuckles after years of warehouse packing, hospital laundry work, and every other job she had taken to keep two children fed after Ethan's father left. She did not care how much money appeared in business magazines beside her son's name. She cared whether he slept, whether he ate breakfast, and whether the powerful people he worked with remembered their own obligations.
"Is this the airline that keeps talking about cutting employees?" she asked.
"Two thousand positions are exposed if the refinancing fails," Ethan said. "Not all of them will necessarily disappear, but too many people are living month to month waiting for executives to decide." He took a sip of coffee. "We think there is a way through without a broad layoff."
"Then make them put it in writing," Marilyn said.
He smiled. "You sound like James."
"James sounds like me because somebody finally taught him sense."
She waited until he looked up from the tablet before speaking again. "And Ethan? Don't spend your whole life believing that because you can save something, you're required to. Some people will let you empty yourself out and still complain that you didn't do it with a smile."