"Call her before you call your investors," Shelley said. "That isn't legal advice. It's what I'd want someone to tell me if I were in your position."
Joy answered while standing in a grocery store aisle. He could hear the soft hum of refrigerated cases and a cart rattling nearby. When he said he had been removed from the plane, her first question was whether he was being held somewhere. He assured her that he was free to travel and that his ticket had been valid. Then he told her what the woman had said, what the crew had done, and how the airline's employees had apologized after discovering his identity.
"Did you eat anything?" Joy asked when he finished. Darius nearly smiled. He understood the question was not a way of avoiding the injury but a way of returning him to a body that needed care even while his mind raced.
"A stale sandwich, apparently, is the next exciting item on my schedule," he said. She told him to buy one and eat it. Then she asked whether he wanted her to come to Newark.
"No," he said. "I want you here with Zion. I want the week to stay as normal as it can for her." Joy allowed a moment to pass before replying.
"Normal doesn't mean we pretend something didn't happen," she said. "She'll hear about it eventually, and I'd rather she hear it from us." Darius looked at his reflection in the terminal glass, the navy suit and tired face of a man who suddenly wanted nothing more complicated than to be sitting at his own kitchen table.
He called the company's chief operating officer, Mateo Alvarez, next. Mateo had been there in the early days, when the first routing product occasionally crashed at two in the morning and neither man knew whether the customer would tolerate another outage. He was practical, sometimes impatient, and so loyal to the people doing the technical work that Darius occasionally had to remind him there were customers outside the engineering department. Mateo listened to the airport story without interrupting. Then he asked a question Darius had expected.
"Do we stop the meeting?" Darius looked at the departing aircraft outside the window. "No," he said.
"We go. We listen to what they say, and we make sure they understand that this raises issues about governance, accountability, and the way concerns move through their organization. Then we decide whether those issues can be addressed or whether the risks outweigh the benefits." Mateo exhaled. "You sound like you're writing a risk assessment." Darius told him that was because the situation required one.
Their technical lead, Anika Shah, joined the call from Oakland. She had spent the previous week running stress tests on simulated weather disruptions over the Midwest and was tired enough to be blunt. "I don't like the idea of punishing the operations teams for something gate staff did," she said. Darius told her he agreed.