An outside agricultural attorney reviewed the final agreement. It provided access to original intake histories under appropriate privacy safeguards, defined the liaison's role in observing and documenting disputed inspections, and required both organizations to preserve the evidence supporting a final decision. It established mileage reimbursement, medical coverage during the trial, a clear salary, and a review process in which neither Bridgeville nor Heritage could unilaterally remove the liaison for a finding made in good faith. Permanent employment would require another vote after sixty days, based on performance and the usefulness of the position rather than the popularity of the employee.
The Heritage board approved the trial by eleven votes to three. Samuel abstained from recommending a candidate after disclosing his involvement in the produce-counter incident, and a small hiring panel that included Felix and an independent reviewer selected Tessa. She accepted only after receiving the signed final agreement and confirming that Bridgeville's reinstatement decision preserved the benefits and seniority she had earned before her dismissal. The transition between the two positions was documented, so she did not have to gamble her medical coverage on an informal promise.
Her first day as independent quality liaison did not include a ceremony. She drove to a small Bridgeville receiving center at six in the morning, parked beside the loading dock, and introduced herself to a clerk who was trying to resolve a disputed temperature reading on a vegetable load. The clerk had three trucks waiting and no time for explanations. Tessa took off her coat, opened the intake record, and asked to see the calibrated thermometer and the actual product temperature before anyone selected a fault code.
The reading turned out to be wrong because the dock thermometer had been left beside a heating vent between uses. The vegetables were within specification, and the clerk corrected the equipment problem without assigning blame to the grower. Tessa documented the correction and moved on to the next truck. It was a small beginning, the kind no one would write a headline about, and she found it more reassuring than all the speeches made after her firing.
At the original Bridgeville store, the new interim produce supervisor was a woman named Carla Jenkins who had been transferred from another location. Carla had a reputation for being strict about procedures and was not particularly pleased to find a former employee returning with authority to examine receiving records. She asked Tessa whether this meant every shipment would require another layer of paperwork. Tessa said no: properly documented deliveries should move faster, not slower, because there would be fewer disputes to reconstruct afterward.
They reviewed the revised intake screen together. It now separated received, inspected, accepted, partially accepted, and rejected into clearly distinct actions, with the identity and time of each recorded event visible to anyone authorized to review the lot. A manager could still correct an error, but the correction had to refer to the original event and include the inspection evidence supporting it. The software did not make dishonest behavior impossible, Tessa knew, but it made hiding the sequence considerably harder.