Angela was among the visitors that day. Her complaint had progressed through counsel and a structured settlement discussion, but she cautioned Marcus that the slow pace of accountability was wearing her down. She had considered giving up several times. He told her that choosing not to pursue a case further would not make her experience less real, and that any decision about her life belonged to her.
"I'm not giving up yet," she replied. "I just needed someone to tell me this isn't supposed to become my whole personality."
"It isn't," Marcus said. "You're allowed to have a career, friends, and weekends that have nothing to do with a boarding pass."
They spoke afterward about her new job, a logistics role in which she had already become known for finding small errors before they turned costly. Marcus offered advice when she asked but did not suggest she owed him gratitude or public participation in his work. Her independence mattered more to the program than any photograph of a billionaire beside a grateful client.
On the anniversary of his father's death, Marcus visited the cemetery with his mother. Daniel Chen had died years before Chen Industries became the company it was now, but he had lived long enough to see Marcus save that first failing factory. Evelyn placed flowers by the headstone and told a story about Daniel spending an entire Saturday repairing a neighbor's broken washing machine because buying a new one would have been too expensive. Marcus remembered his father's patience with the machine and his impatience with anyone who treated a customer as unimportant.
"He'd have told you to check the connection before throwing out the whole thing," Evelyn said, glancing at her son.
Marcus smiled. "He did tell me that. Usually when I wanted to replace something we couldn't afford."
She looked at him. "And what are you doing with that airline?"
"Checking whether the connections can be repaired."
Evelyn nodded, then looked back at the headstone. They stood together without speaking for a while. Marcus had spent months defending his decision not to sell immediately to commentators who believed a dramatic divestment would have proved moral seriousness. His mother's question reminded him that patient repair and stubborn delay could look similar from the outside, and the only way to distinguish them was to keep measuring whether anything actually improved.
By the end of the first year, Atlantic had installed the verification and reporting controls across its domestic network. Independent testing still found failures, and the board ordered corrective action where managers tried to bypass the rules to improve departure statistics. Complaint data had become more detailed, which initially made the airline look worse on paper. Over time, the proportion of substantiated incidents involving unauthorized premium-seat changes began falling, with the auditors publishing enough methodology to show that the decline was not merely a drop in reporting.