Owen considered the question. "You never asked whether I still thought about it. You asked why I wanted this job."
She accepted the correction. "Fair enough. Where did the idea come from?"
"I recognized the shape of the problem. I spent years studying optimization, and the board showed a boundary that didn't look consistent with the rest of the assumptions. I could be wrong about the system as a whole; I only saw a fragment."
"You weren't wrong about the fragment."
"That's good." He glanced at the filters. "The team should be credited for checking it before acting on it."
Claire watched the familiar way he shifted attention back toward the work he had been doing. His restraint was genuine, yet she wondered whether it had become a form of protection against the disappointment of being noticed only when he did something extraordinary. She wanted to offer him a different position on the spot, but remembered how firmly he had chosen his present role. Instead she asked how things were going on the operations floor.
"The work itself is going well," he said.
"And Greg Dalton?"
He looked at her. "Mr. Dalton seems unhappy with how the area is maintained. Teresa knows about the complaints."
"Are they justified?"
"Some are ordinary corrections. Others aren't really about cleaning." Owen paused before continuing. "I don't think I can decide what you ought to do about him. That's your responsibility, not mine."
The statement was so direct that Claire felt her face warm. She had not asked Owen to absolve her, but she realized she had come close to doing exactly that. "You're right," she said. "It is my responsibility."
He adjusted the cart and prepared to continue. "You built a company here, Claire. It's impressive. But it's hard to know what happens everywhere in a place this big."
"Hard isn't the same as impossible."
"No," Owen agreed. "It isn't."
Claire left him with that answer and took the executive elevator upstairs. The city outside her office windows had turned bright after the morning rain, and sunlight moved across the table where she kept her weekly reports. She opened the incident summary, read the first version, and asked Marcus to add more detail about the distinction between Owen's observation and the team's technical implementation. The company needed a reliable account of what had happened, not a myth about a miraculous seven-line repair.
The official record mattered because Greg Dalton had already begun writing another one. At four thirty, he contacted Marianne Holt and described Owen's entrance into the conference room as a serious breach of security. He asserted that a custodial employee without technical authorization had inspected proprietary formulas, entered a restricted discussion, and influenced decisions with financial consequences. In his message he used the phrases exposure risk, chain of command, and disciplinary precedent, terms selected carefully enough to sound like governance rather than resentment.