Audrey underlined a line in her legal pad: "Insufficient evidence of compliance is not proof of system failure, but it is not permission to claim compliance." She asked Marla whether the revised testing could be completed in a reasonable time if engineers received the appropriate authority and resources. Marla said the team would first need to determine which conditions reproduced the lag consistently, then evaluate whether the issue required a design change or a change to the test procedure. It could not honestly be promised by a date chosen before the work was done.
"Then the customer needs that answer," Audrey said. "Not a date invented to make us comfortable."
At eight, Audrey called Nolan and asked whether he would be willing to return for a short conversation before the board meeting. She stressed that he was not obligated to come in on Christmas Eve and that the auditors could use his prior recorded statement if he preferred to remain home. Nolan glanced at the half-finished soup and the cardboard box, then said that if she needed clarification about the old reports he could be there within the hour.
"You don't have to do this because I interrupted your dismissal," Audrey said.
"I'm not coming for that reason," he replied. "I want the testing fixed."
He arrived wearing the same jacket, and Audrey met him not in her spacious office but in a small twentieth-floor conference room with mismatched chairs. Someone had left a half-erased calculation on the whiteboard, and a tiny paper star hung crooked above the door. The room reminded Nolan of the practical spaces where engineers solved problems, rather than the polished rooms where finished results were presented.
Audrey placed copies of his old submissions on the table. "I read your warnings," she said. "All of them."
Nolan did not smile. "Then you know why the current project needs another test before anyone signs it."
"I do. We've paused certification on the affected portion, and essential safety work is continuing. The engineers will build a plan based on the actual measurements."
He looked down at the pages. "That's all I wanted three years ago."
"It shouldn't have taken three years and a public dismissal for those documents to reach the right person," she said. "I relied on the summaries my executives gave me. I thought I was avoiding micromanagement. Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether the summaries were complete."
Nolan turned the paper cup she had given him earlier, now filled with water, between his hands. "Questions are cheap," he said. "Ignoring the answers is expensive."
A laugh escaped Audrey before she could stop it. The sound startled both of them. She had spent most of the day hearing people measure risk in legal and financial terms, and Nolan had reduced the central failure to a sentence her father might have spoken at his workbench. The laugh did not diminish the seriousness of the matter. It made the room feel less like an arena in which someone had to win.
They discussed the testing itself for nearly half an hour. Nolan explained how he had fallen in love with technical work because machines revealed their problems to anyone patient enough to listen. A failure that seemed random often contained a pattern, he said, though finding it required accepting that the first explanation might be wrong. Audrey described her father's radio shop and the quiet pride he took in making a damaged receiver play music again. They discovered that both had grown up watching skilled hands solve problems that wealthier people dismissed as trivial.
"I used to think I would never lose that respect for the work," Audrey said. "Now I wonder how many people in this company I've only ever known as a figure on an organization chart."