The room went quiet. Outside, a jet lifted off the far runway, sound arriving a second after the sight of it. Diane Frost closed her folio — slowly, the way people do when they've made a decision they don't love.
"Then we pause," she said. "The merger talks are suspended until further notice." She stood, folio under her arm. "Call me when your house is in order."
Chapter Twelve
Theo Park
"Find him," Daniel told Elena the morning after Diane Frost walked out. "Theo Park. The student from the complaints file. No lawyers, no PR people, no cameras. Just me."
Elena's pen stopped. "Daniel, the board is —"
"I know what the board is. Find him."
They met on Thursday at a coffee shop two blocks from campus, the kind with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu nobody could read in the dim light. Theo Park was already there when Daniel arrived, twenty-one, earbuds in, a backpack slumped against his chair like a tired dog. He looked up, did a visible double take, and pulled the earbuds out slowly.
"You're the ticket guy," he said.
"I'm Daniel Cross."
"I know who you are. Everybody knows who you are now." Theo gestured at the empty chair. "Is this the part where you offer me money to stop talking to reporters?"
Daniel sat. "I already read your email. Twice. I came to apologize in person, and to refund the four hundred eighty-two dollars."
Theo blinked. "You came here yourself."
"Would you have preferred a form letter?"
A short laugh, surprised out of him. "Fair." He ordered nothing; Daniel ordered black coffee he didn't particularly want, because his hands needed something to do. "So. What do you want to know?"
"Tell me what happened. Not the email version. The real one."
Theo leaned back. "My sister graduated in May. Northwestern. Medill, journalism — she's the smart one, I'm the one who got waitlisted everywhere." He said it lightly, the way people say things that aren't light at all. "I bought the ticket in March with my student fare. Then at the counter, the agent — your agent — tells me my student ID expired in January and the fare's invalid. Four hundred eighty-two dollars difference, take it or leave it, and the line behind me is getting restless."
"Claire Donovan," Daniel said quietly.
"Blonde, tight bun, looked right through me. I tried to explain the ID renewed in February, I had the new one on my phone, but she said the system is the system." Theo's jaw tightened. "I didn't have four eighty-two. I'm a junior working two campus jobs. So I watched my sister graduate on a livestream in my dorm room while my roommate pretended not to notice I was crying."
He pulled out his phone and turned it toward Daniel. On the screen: a photo of a student ID, renewed February, valid through the following year — and beneath it, a receipt for $482.00, stamped with Meridian's logo.
"She never even looked at the new one," Theo said. "I held it up and she said the system had already decided."
Daniel looked at the receipt for a long moment. Somewhere in Terminal Four, in a training manual he had once approved without reading closely enough, there was a rule about expired credentials and fare differences. Rules were supposed to protect people. This one had been used as a wall.
"Twenty-one," Daniel said quietly. "My daughter's twenty-four. When she was your age she called me from an airport in Denver because her connection got canceled and nobody at the counter would look up from their screen. I called the station manager personally." He met Theo's eyes. "You didn't have anyone to call."
"Yeah, well." Theo pocketed the phone. "Most people don't."
The coffee arrived. Daniel wrapped his hands around the cup and said nothing for a moment, because there was nothing adequate to say.
"I can't give you back that day," he said finally. "I'm sorry. The refund's already processed — it'll be in your account by Monday. And I want you to know the agent wasn't following a rule. She was following a metric. That's on me, not just her."
Theo studied him. "You really went undercover? Like, with a fake ticket?"
"A real ticket. She tore it in half."
"Legend." Theo grinned despite himself, then the grin faded. "So what now? You fire her and everything's fine?"
"She wasn't fired. She's in a remediation program — retraining, passenger assistance duty."
"Huh." Theo turned his cup in slow circles. "You know what your problem is? You keep trying to fix this from the top. Memos, hearings, programs. But the rot's at the counter, man. Nobody up there knows what it's like down here."
"Then tell me what it's like."
"You need mystery passengers." Theo said it like it was obvious. "People my age. We fly coach anyway — we're broke, we're invisible, nobody upgrades us. Train a bunch of us, send us through your terminals with scorecards, and you'll see what your airline actually looks like when the CEO isn't standing there."
Daniel felt something click into place, the way a seatbelt clicks — small, final. Maya had said culture was what happened when no one was watching. This kid had just handed him a way to watch.
"That's a good idea," Daniel said.
"I know. I'm full of them. Nobody pays me for them, but I'm full of them."
"I'm offering you a paid summer internship. Customer-experience team. You'd help build the program you just described — recruiting, training, the scorecards. You'd report to my daughter; she's designing it with me. She's twenty-four and she'll argue with you about everything."
Theo stared. "Are you serious?"
"Completely. And before you ask — it's not hush money. The refund's separate. This is because you just diagnosed my company better in four minutes than a consulting firm did in four months."
"My mom's going to freak out," Theo said faintly. "She thinks you're the villain in this story."
"What do you think?"
Theo considered. "I think you're the guy whose ticket got torn, same as the rest of us. That's... kind of the point, isn't it?"