"I'm not going to comment on privileged material. " "It's not privileged. Claire Donovan waived it at 9: 00 this morning and released it. " Victoria said, "That's not possible. " And 40 seconds later, she found out it was because a producer in the back row held up a phone with the audio playing and the room heard a woman's voice from 4 months earlier say six words in a tone that was not evil, not cruel, not anything at all except tired. "Marcus, I don't want to know. " The press conference ended at 6: 31. She did not take further questions. At 9: 30 that morning, trading in Aurelia Global was halted for volatility for the second time in 2 days.
At 9: 52, it reopened and fell another 19%. By the closing bell, the company had lost $31 billion in market value in 48 hours, and every business network in America ran the same 81 seconds of footage above the same crawl, and not one of them led with the stock. They all led with the laugh. At 10: 15, the Ohio Attorney General announced a criminal referral. At 10: 40, the Department of Labor opened a parallel investigation into retaliation against a reporting employee.
At 11: 12, Marcus Hale surrendered at a federal building in Columbus with his attorney and entered a proffer agreement, and the first thing he said on the record before anyone asked him a question was, "I want it noted that Dan Whitcomb told me three times, and I put him on nights. " At 12: 30, Ethan Carter sat in his own kitchen in Bellwood and did not turn on the television. Lilly came in from the living room. It's on channel 4. I know. Dad, they're literally talking about you.
I know. Aren't you going to watch? No. She stood there with the remote in her hand. Why not?
Ethan pushed a chair out with his foot. Sit down a minute. She sat. You remember when your mom was sick and everybody kept sending those cards, the ones with the little Bible verses on them? There were like a hundred.
There were 140. I counted because that's the kind of thing I do. He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table. And every one of them made me feel worse. Not because they weren't kind.
They were kind. It's because every card was somebody standing outside of it looking in, and I was inside of it. Okay. That's what channel 4 is right now, Ethan said. That's 140 people standing outside of it.
And I don't want to get used to that feeling, kid, because it feels really good and it isn't real and a man can start doing things just to keep it going. Lily looked at him for a long moment. That's really annoying, she said. What is? That you're right about it.
She set the remote face down on the table. I already watched it seven times at school anyway. At 1: 45 Ethan's phone rang with a Columbus number and a man's voice said, "Mr. Carter, this is Roland Bick. I'm the regional vice president at Delmar Freight.
I'd like to talk to you about your employment status. " You mean the employment status you terminated at 8: 00 in the morning 2 days ago? There was a pause. "That was a mistake that was made at a level below me by somebody responding to a letter from a law firm and it was reversed this morning and you have been continuously employed with no break in service and your benefits were never interrupted. " That's a lot of words for we panicked. Mr. Carter, we panicked.
Ethan actually laughed. "All right, that's better. Come back Monday, same route, same truck and I'm putting you in for the safety supervisor slot that's been open since March. I don't want the slot. Take a week and think about it.
I don't need a week. I've got about 900 pages of documents to go through with a federal investigator and a kid who's got a volleyball tournament on Saturday. Ethan stood up and looked out his kitchen window at the news van that was still parked across the street. But Mr. Bick, I'll take the truck.
I like the truck. At 3: 10 that afternoon, Maya Reynolds called with the thing nobody expected. "Ethan, sit down. I'm standing. Sit down anyway. " He sat.
"They sent a structural team into Marion County last night after the stoppage, independent court appointed out of Cleveland. They ran the roof loading calculation on bay three. And Ethan, the report you carried was wrong. He went cold. Wrong how?
Wrong in the direction that keeps me up at night, Maya said. Holloway structural rated Bay 3 at 140% of design load. Their finding assumed the mechanical units were going on the north half of the span, which is what the March drawings showed. Except somebody moved the units in May. Two air handlers and a condenser bank, all of it relocated over the center span to make room for a materials lift.
Ethan closed his eyes. What's the real number? 206%. Say it again. 206% of design load, Maya said.
Ethan, they didn't just hide a critical finding. They hid a critical finding and then made it worse for 4 months without rechecking it because the man who would have caught it was working nights. Neither of them said anything for a while. When does it fail? Ethan said.
They won't put a date on it. Maya, they won't put a date on it in writing, she said. But the lead engineer told me off the record that with full mechanical running and a shift change crowd standing under it, he wouldn't have wanted to be in that building past October. Ethan put his head in his hand. August 4th was the start date, he said.
October's the shift change with a full crew under it. Yes. 1, 200 people. Yes. At 4: 22 that afternoon, a court-appointed engineer in a hard hat stood in Bay 3 with a laser level and a laptop and watched a reading he did not like.