"Then sign here."
At one thirty-nine, Ethan's pickup entered the east lot.
People on the production floor noticed before the front desk did because news travels strangely inside factories. A loader operator saw the green truck. He told receiving. Receiving told line two. Line two told line four.
By the time Ethan entered the lobby, half the floor knew he was back.
The receptionist printed a visitor pass.
Ethan clipped the paper lanyard exactly where his employee badge had hung that morning.
He walked onto the floor in a clean work shirt with his own meter bag over one shoulder.
Nobody cheered.
That would have been too simple.
Instead, people looked at him with expressions made of relief, embarrassment, and curiosity.
Noel approached first.
"They brought you back?"
"Consulting. One day."
"For Carrington?"
"Yes."
Diane came up beside him.
"I'm sorry I didn't say anything this morning."
Ethan looked at her.
She did not make excuses.
"I opened my mouth and closed it."
"I know."
"That's not enough."
"No."
She nodded because he had not relieved her of the discomfort.
Then Sterling Carrington walked onto the floor.
He had arrived ten minutes early with three members of his acceptance team. He was tall, gray-haired, and wore no tie.
Vanessa and Grant accompanied him.
Sterling saw Ethan and crossed the space directly.
He held out his hand.
"Good to see the man I actually came here to meet."
The sentence was not loud.
It carried anyway.
Ethan shook his hand.
"Let's make sure your lot is good."
"That's all I want."
For the next two hours, Ethan worked.
He did not perform anger. He did not use the moment to embarrass anyone. He walked Carrington's team through the calibration chain step by step.
He showed them the repaired timing card, the thermal traces, the compensation values, and the reasoning behind each value. Katherine joined the review and asked the questions she had been unable to answer that morning.
Ethan answered every one.
"Why point eight on the third compensation?" she asked.
"Fixture baseplate grows enough under sustained cycle to shift the datum after about ninety minutes. Point eight offsets the measured average from the correlation run."
"Where's that study?"
"Draft transfer package, folder three. I didn't release it because the sample set wasn't complete."
"Is the effect stable?"
"Stable across twenty-six runs so far. Needs thirty before I'd freeze it."
Katherine nodded and wrote it down.
At three thirty-five, Ethan stopped beside fixture two.
He frowned.