Fang Lihua was pulling off her nitrile gloves, one finger at a time, slowly, the way a surgeon does at the end of a long operation. When they were off she folded them together and put them in the pocket of her jacket. Then she held out her bare right hand to Tomás.
He looked at it, surprised. Then he pulled off his own glove and took her hand and shook it.
Fang held on. She spoke to him in Mandarin, looking him in the eye, quietly and clearly. Amara rendered it into English half a beat behind her.
"At Huaxin," Fang said, "an engineer like you would have his own laboratory. And he would work on whatever he wanted."
* * *
Tomás laughed again, a rough, broken sound, closer to a sob than a laugh, and he did not let go of Fang's hand. He stood there holding it with his head down, his shoulders moving.
Bradley stepped forward.
He came and stood in front of Tomás, a little to one side so as not to come between him and Fang, and took off his hard hat and held it in both hands, the way men hold their hats at funerals.
"Tomás," he said. "I'm sorry."
Tomás looked up.
"Two years ago you came up to my office with that graph," Bradley said. "I remember it. I remember you standing in front of my desk. I remember I was on my phone the whole time you were talking. I said something like I'll take a look and I put it in a drawer, and I never took it out." He stopped. "I wasn't listening. I was too proud and too busy and too worried about the investors and too sure I already knew everything I needed to know. You were the one person in this building who actually understood the line. And I treated you like an expense." He swallowed. "Four hundred people's jobs depended on it, and I didn't listen to the one man who could have saved them. I'm sorry. I don't expect that to fix anything."
Amara rendered it for Fang, quietly, beside her. Fang's face did not change at all. But she was watching Bradley very closely.
Tomás let go of Fang's hand at last. He looked at Bradley for a long time.
"My wife," he said, "told me to quit four times. Lucía. Four times in two years. She said, Tomás, that man does not see you. He doesn't know you exist. Why are you breaking your heart for him?" He shook his head. "And I didn't quit. You know why? Not for you. For the line. For my crew. I trained every one of those people myself. Some of them followed me here from Nevada. If I leave, who's going to tell the next guy what's wrong? Who's going to tell him about the humidity?" He paused. "So I stayed."
He looked at Bradley a moment longer.
"I accept your apology," he said. "Mostly."
He bent and picked his hard hat up off the cart and put it back on his head, firmly, and settled it, and pulled his reading glasses down off his forehead onto his nose for the first time all morning.
"Now," said Tomás Herrera. "Do you want to fix my ovens? Or do you want to stand there looking sorry?"
* * *
Lin had not been with them at the line for most of the morning. Amara had noticed him leave, quietly, after the first half hour, and had seen him from time to time in the distance, a small figure in a gray jacket and a white hard hat, walking slowly along the other lines on the floor. Stopping. Talking to people. Once she had seen him stand for nearly twenty minutes at the cell assembly station beside a young woman in a hairnet and a blue smock, watching her work, asking her questions. Later Amara would learn what he had asked. How old her children were. How long her commute was. What she thought was wrong with the factory.
At 10:15 they all walked out together into the parking lot.
The morning had cleared. The sky over the hills was a pale washed blue, and the salt marsh beyond the lettuce warehouse glittered in the sun. The gulls were still lined up along the roof. In the shallow water the egrets stood exactly where they had been at dawn, as though they had not moved at all, which perhaps they hadn't.
Lin stopped beside the Suburban. He took off his hard hat and handed it to Zhou Jian, who took it without looking. Then Lin turned to face Bradley.
"I've made a decision," he said in English. He turned his head slightly. "Ms. Adeyemi, I'll say this in English, because I want Mr. Kincaid to hear it from me directly. But I'd like you to put it into Mandarin for my colleagues afterward, and to explain it to Mr. Kincaid's colleagues as well, if they have questions. I don't want anything misunderstood."
"Of course," said Amara.
Lin looked at Bradley.
"It is not what you hoped for," he said. "But I think it may be better."
He told him.
Huaxin would not buy the Fremont factory. Not now. Instead, it would take a minority stake in Kincaid Grid Storage, enough to keep the doors open, and it would enter into a technical partnership. Dr. Fang would bring a team of engineers from Shenzhen, and they would live in California for six months and work on the coating line. With Mr. Herrera. Under Mr. Herrera. Mr. Herrera would lead the work, and he would report to nobody.
He would get the four million dollars and the six weeks of downtime he had asked for two years ago.
At the end of six months, if the defect rate on the coating line was below three percent, Huaxin and Kincaid would sit down again and discuss a full acquisition, at a fair price. If it was not, they would shake hands and part as friends.
Bradley listened to all of it without speaking. When Lin had finished, he opened his mouth, and Lin raised one hand, very slightly.
"There is one more condition," he said. "For you personally."
Bradley closed his mouth.