At headquarters, Clare ordered an independent technical review of the unaltered prototype data and temporarily halted preparations for certification. She also asked counsel to determine whether Ethan's dismissal had breached the company's own reporting protections. Vanessa protested that the company could not undo a major restructuring every time an employee disagreed with management. Clare replied that she was not undoing it because of disagreement, but investigating evidence that a safety report had been concealed.
Richard received an updated notice from the federal review team shortly before midnight. Their examination would begin Monday morning, and they would not accept a technical attestation from anyone who lacked authority under the original architecture agreement. The condition had been present in an old certification appendix that current managers apparently had not read carefully. Richard forwarded the document to Clare and wrote a brief note: This was never intended to be a ceremonial signature.
Clare stayed in her office until the cleaners began working around the conference table. She had spent four years learning to make difficult decisions quickly, and now she understood how easily speed could become an excuse for leaving questions unanswered. The most important person in the room on Tuesday had not been a visiting official or a senior engineer. It had been the employee she had asked for evidence and then failed to protect when he provided it.
At one in the morning, she sent a short message to Ethan's work address and received an automatic notice that the account was inactive. She had never seen a disabled account feel like an accusation before. She wrote down his home address from the personnel file, then closed the laptop without sleeping. The first thing she needed to do on Saturday was not negotiate a technical deadline, but ask a man she had helped dismiss whether he would permit her to tell the truth.
Saturday morning arrived bright and unexpectedly warm. Ethan woke before six out of habit, lay still for a moment, and listened for Lily moving upstairs. The house was quiet except for the refrigerator and a sparrow tapping at the gutter outside the kitchen window. He made pancakes because he had promised he would, not because he felt much appetite.
Lily came downstairs carrying her toy microphone and an official-looking folder she had assembled from construction paper. She announced that today's science fair rehearsal would include questions from an imaginary panel of extremely difficult judges. Ethan was assigned the role of skeptical adult, which she explained meant he had to look suspicious and ask whether the plane was secretly held together with wishes. He promised to take the responsibility seriously.
They ate pancakes at the small table while sunlight moved across the floor. Lily told him about a classmate who wanted to build an entire airport out of cardboard, then asked whether losing his job meant he would be home more often. Ethan said it probably would for a while. Her face brightened before she caught herself and asked whether that was a bad thing.
"It's a difficult thing," he said. "Some difficult things have a little good mixed in." She considered that and took another bite of pancake. Ethan felt the old familiar conflict between wanting to keep his daughter free of adult problems and knowing she had always been perceptive enough to notice them anyway.