She returned to the basement after lunch and unlocked a steel cabinet in the cleaning supply room. Inside it was a dark brown leather briefcase with scuffed corners, a folded blue ribbon through one handle, and a small crack near the brass clasp. No one had ever bothered to ask what she kept in it. People generally believed that a janitor's belongings were as unimportant as the work she did.
Otis laid the briefcase across her knees and opened it. She did not take out the certificate first. She took out a photograph, much older than the one upstairs, of herself and Thomas in a workshop on a brutally hot July afternoon in 1988. Both were laughing, and both were covered with grease. Behind them, on a chalkboard, was the sketch of a pump assembly that had eventually become the company's first commercial success.
Beneath the photograph lay a faded engineering diploma from Howard University and several pieces of correspondence from the law office that had safeguarded the original ownership agreement. The documents weren't secret in a legal sense. They had been recorded in the company stock ledger, later confirmed by successive corporate secretaries, and reviewed each year by a trustee. They were secret only to people who had decided a woman in a cleaning uniform couldn't possibly matter enough to investigate.
She lifted the share certificate. Fifty-one percent of the voting common shares. Her own name, Otis Marian Carter, printed in a typeface that had gone out of fashion before Ryan reached high school. Thomas had wanted her name in the public materials too. She had asked to wait, believing the company was too young to survive the prejudices that would be directed at its female cofounder.
She had been waiting ever since.
In 1988, Otis had been thirty-one years old and newly graduated, a little older than most of her classmates and much more tired. Her path to Howard University had not been straight. She had worked through community college, interrupted her studies to care for a sick mother, and spent evenings checking calculations at a kitchen table while her younger siblings slept. When she finally crossed the graduation stage with her engineering diploma, she had carried the stubborn joy of someone who knew exactly what the achievement had cost.
Her first interview after graduation was at a manufacturer of industrial drives. The hiring manager spent more time asking whether she could handle a shop full of men than he spent discussing the design portfolio she had brought. Another company told her its clients weren't accustomed to taking technical directions from women. A third offered her an administrative position after conceding that her engineering examination scores were among the highest it had seen that year. Otis refused that offer politely and cried on the bus home where no one could see her.