He called his daughter from the parking lot. Tessa answered immediately, asking whether he had told the truth. He said yes, and she asked whether it changed anything. Nolan watched snow melt along the edge of the windshield and told her the board had suspended Blair and appointed new leadership, but that he did not know yet whether the company would become a better place.
"What about you?" she asked. He looked toward the warehouse one last time. "I'm going home," he answered, and for once the words did not feel like an apology for leaving work. Tessa told him she had put the kettle on and that there was still pie. He started the truck with a steadier hand than the one that had turned the key after his firing.
Dana's first afternoon as interim chief executive did not resemble the triumphant moment people later imagined. She spent it answering questions from supervisors who needed to know whether their schedules would change, from customers who wanted accurate departure estimates, and from employees frightened that the sudden leadership shift meant the company was about to close. She made no grand announcement about a new era. She told people the operation would continue, that safety requirements would not be waived to meet shipping targets, and that approved commitments would be honored unless there was a genuine emergency handled through the proper process.
The overnight schedule was rebuilt with difficulty. Two certified supervisors who had agreed to temporary coverage returned for a few shifts, and a small number of experienced day employees volunteered for training that would qualify them for additional duties over time. Dana insisted on counting both the training hours and the higher temporary labor costs in the financial reports. She did not want another presentation in which a green number concealed somebody else's exhausting night.
Northstar Markets received a complete corrective plan on Monday. It included the three hundred seventeen intervention records, a documented method for allocating correction hours to system costs, and a timetable for testing the scheduling platform before any more staffing reductions were considered. Renee Calder appreciated the honesty but did not pretend that the previous week's events had no cost. She told Dana that Northstar would move a portion of its freight to another provider until Whitmore demonstrated stable performance under the revised plan.
The decision hurt. A three-year contract worth thirty-eight million dollars could not be treated as secure when a major customer was redistributing volume, and the move forced Whitmore to reconsider several planned investments. Dana told the board that the company could recover trust only by making promises its operating staff could keep. She refused to fill the gap with speculative delivery targets, even when one director suggested the company needed a more optimistic message.