Robert Sinclair raised his hand. "I have one. The plan assumes the affected employees will accept a temporary staffing freeze without any consultation. We should talk to their representatives before deciding what is practical."
Angela nodded and asked Maria to add the consultation to the timetable. The meeting continued for another hour, sometimes tense, sometimes technical, but never resembling the performance Hawthorne had staged years earlier. No one was asked to remain silent because an answer was inconvenient. No one was praised simply for agreeing with the controlling shareholder.
Afterward, Patricia stayed behind while Angela packed her notebook. "You know," she said, "the best thing you've done here isn't the takeover. It's allowing the board to tell you no."
Angela smiled. "You do that rather enthusiastically."
"Somebody has to."
"That's why I asked you to chair it."
Patricia looked toward the windows. "One day you'll leave Thornfield. Investors do, leaders do, even founders eventually have to. If the reforms depend on your personality, they'll disappear when you walk out. If they survive you, then you built something."
Angela did not answer immediately. She had been thinking about the same question, especially as Apex evaluated its long-term investment strategy. The company could be sold, its shares dispersed, or its leadership reshaped. Any of those events would test whether the safeguards had become habits or remained a special project attached to Angela Morgan's name.
"We'll find out," she said. "And if we did it correctly, the answer shouldn't require me to be in the room."
Later that day she visited the customer service department where she had spent twelve weeks working under an ordinary employee number. The layout had changed, with quieter spaces for difficult calls and a better system for sharing process improvements. On one wall hung a board showing proposals submitted by employees and the decisions made about them. Some had been adopted; others had been rejected with explanations. Nobody had tried to hide the rejections, which pleased Angela more than she expected.
Maria Gonzalez stood near the central desk, speaking with a new employee about a complicated customer issue. She had become a team lead after a formal promotion process, and the role suited her. When she noticed Angela, she smiled but finished helping the new employee before coming over. The tiny delay felt like its own statement: important work no longer had to stop because someone powerful appeared.
"I heard your call-routing idea finally became companywide," Angela said.
"The good parts did," Maria replied. "The bad parts were pretty bad. I would have liked them better if they were all brilliant, but apparently nobody gets everything right on the first try."
Angela laughed. "That sounds familiar."
"The biggest change is that people explain things now," Maria continued. "When I was new, I thought a rejection meant my manager had already decided what kind of person I was. Now I can ask what was missing and try again. It's a different kind of workday."