He built a chart, flagged the common component, and recommended an immediate inspection.
Tessa glanced at the first page and pushed it back. "You were asked to sort documents."
"I did."
"You were not asked to speculate about engineering."
"The pressure readings drop within the same range before each failure."
"Our engineers have degrees."
Caleb looked at the initials on the rejected reports. Three had been submitted by veteran mechanics.
"So do some of the people who've been ignored."
Tessa's mouth tightened.
That afternoon, she reassigned him to inventory labels. The next day, she told co-workers that temporary staff often invented problems to make themselves look indispensable.
By lunch, two junior analysts were imitating the way Caleb carried his thermos. One asked whether the staffing agency had recruited him from a roadside repair shop. Another pointed at the patch on his jacket and said the company's brand team might pay him to stay out of photographs.
Caleb answered without anger. He had been poor. He had been rich. Neither condition had changed the weight of a wrench in his hand or the responsibility he felt when another person's safety depended on his work.
The mockery mattered less to him than what it revealed. He saw employees correct their accents before speaking to executives. He saw warehouse veterans excluded from meetings where their own work was discussed.
He watched a young data scientist named Kira Bloom present a routing improvement only to have a better-dressed manager repeat the idea 10 minutes later and receive the credit. He found that Rosa Alvarez, who had cleaned the building for 14 years, knew which executives made interns cry and which managers stayed late to help their teams.
The people who seemed invisible knew the company better than those who controlled it. Caleb listened.
At night, he drove to the modest brick house he shared with Wren in a neighborhood west of the city. He made grilled cheese, checked spelling homework, and tried not to show the fatigue in his face.
Wren had inherited Lena's sharp eyes and Caleb's habit of asking direct questions. On his fourth night undercover, she found him sewing the strap on his tool bag.
"Did somebody laugh at it?" she asked.
Caleb glanced up. "Why would you think that?"
"Because you only fix that strap when somebody makes you feel bad about it."
He smiled despite himself. "You're getting too observant."
"Mom said being observant was only rude when you used it to hurt somebody."
Caleb set down the needle. Wren sat across from him in flannel pajamas, her math workbook open between them.
"A few people at work think old things don't belong in expensive buildings," he said.
"Do they know you own the building?"
"No."
"Then tell them."
"That would change how they act."
"Isn't that the point?"