Chapter 4
I stopped at the heavy frosted glass door of his office. I turned around and looked at him.
He was sweating. A thin sheen of moisture glistened on his forehead beneath the sharp salon haircut. His tailored suit jacket hung slightly crooked. For three months, he had treated the human capital of Landmark like rows on a spreadsheet—numbers to be trimmed, compressed, and redistributed to make his operational margins look brilliant on quarterly slides.
"You told me two weeks ago that Harrington runs itself, Damian," I said, holding the doorknob. "Let’s see if it does."
I pulled the door open and stepped out into the hallway.
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The atrium was dead silent when I walked through.
Word travels in an office with the speed of an electrical surge through water. Opal was standing by the reception counter, her eyes wide, holding the visitor log. Across the open floor plan, Parker was sitting at his glass desk, his arms crossed over his chest, his phone buzzing repeatedly against his mousepad. He was staring at his screen with the look of a man who had suddenly realized that the foundation beneath his feet was made of sand.
Beside him, two of his junior coordinators were huddled over a monitor, whispering in frantic bursts.
"Forty-eight flights stuck on the tarmac in Denver," I overheard one say. "The Harrington regional VP is on line three demanding an override code. Nobody has the direct dispatch number for United’s corporate desk."
I walked past them without stopping.
I didn't gloat. I didn't slam doors. I didn't stop to give a dramatic speech. When you have spent fourteen years doing the heavy lifting in an organization, you don't need to make noise on your way out; the sudden absence of your weight creates its own deafening roar.
Opal caught up with me near the elevator bank. She held out a small envelope.
"Emmett," she said softly. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
"Thank you for everything, Opal," I said, taking the envelope. It was a card signed by the ten frontline customer support agents who had worked the night shifts with me over the years.
"He called an emergency all-hands for eleven," Opal whispered, glancing over her shoulder at Gable’s corner office, where the blinds were now shut tight. "The regional directors from New York are dialing in. Jocelyn Fairbanks sent a formal notice of breach to our legal inbox twenty minutes ago. She invoked the twenty-four-hour service level failure clause."