The noise was a particular noise. Nadia had heard it in break rooms and canteens and on loading docks before shift briefings all her life, the low, overlapping murmur of a lot of people talking about the same thing without saying what it was. When she came in from the side door with Gerald and Celia, the murmur did not stop. It changed pitch. It went down, and sharpened, and several hundred heads turned in a slow wave, front to back, like wheat.
She did not look for Vanessa. She looked at the screen, where someone had put up a slide in the company's blue: WELCOME, NADIA KERR. Two r's, not three. She found Priya near the front, in an aisle seat, and Priya gave her a small, fierce thumbs-up from her lap, and that helped more than anything else had all morning.
Marcus was standing by the side door, against the wall, arms folded, in his crooked tie. He nodded at her once. She nodded back.
Gerald took the small microphone from its stand, tapped it, winced at the squeal, and waited for it to die. "Morning, everybody," he said. "Thank you for coming up. I know some of you came in on your day off, and I know some of you are supposed to be on the road, so I'll be quick, which those of you who've been here a while know is a lie."
A laugh. Thin, but real.
"It's been a hard year," Gerald said. "I'm not going to pretend otherwise. You've all been working twice as hard to fix problems that weren't your fault, and some of them were mine. Six months ago I told the board that I needed someone to come in who'd done this before, who knew how a freight business really runs from the dock up, and who wasn't afraid of me." He glanced sideways. "I think I found somebody who's not afraid of anything. It's my pleasure to introduce our new Chief Operating Officer. Nadia Kerr."
The applause started at the front with dispatch, who did not yet know anything except that she'd once been one of them, according to the bio, and spread backward, uneven, the way applause spreads when people are clapping and also watching each other clap. Nadia took the microphone. It was warm from Gerald's hand. She did not go behind the little lectern. She stood beside it.
From here she could see the back wall, and she let herself see it now. Vanessa was there, by the coffee urns, a little apart from the people on either side of her, as if a cushion of air had formed around her. Beige blazer. Tote held in front of her by both handles. Her chin was up. Beside her, a woman in a wet running fleece stood close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.
Nadia let her eyes move past them, not avoiding, not stopping, the way she would scan any room.
"Thank you," she said. Her voice came out of the speakers a fraction of a second after it left her, and she adjusted to it. "I was told I'd have notes. There was a draft. I'm told it was mostly about synergies." A ripple of laughter, mostly from finance. "So I'll do this without notes, and it'll be short, because a lot of you have trucks to move.
"My name is Nadia. I started as a night dispatcher at a port you've never heard of, at a desk with a broken chair, which I fixed myself, because nobody else was going to. I've worked loading docks, yards, the ops floor and an office with a window. The window was nicer. The dock taught me more.
"I'm going to spend my first weeks here asking questions, and mostly I'll be asking the people who actually do the work. If you're on a dispatch desk at three in the morning and the routing software tells you to do something stupid, I want to know. If you're in the yard and a process makes your job harder for no reason, I want to know. I'm not going to remember everyone's name in the first week. I will by the end of the month.
"I'll tell you two things I care about, so you can hold me to them." She paused. The dog under the chair yawned audibly, and someone shushed it, and someone else laughed, and she waited until it passed. "The first is results. Not how things look. Whether the truck got there, whether the client got their stock, whether the invoice was right. I'm going to judge my own work that way, and I'll judge everyone's work that way, including mine first.
"The second is how we treat each other, and how we treat the people who come through our doors, whether they're customers, couriers, temps, or someone whose badge doesn't work yet." She did not change her tone. She did not look toward the back. "You can't usually tell who someone is by looking at them. I've learned that from both sides. So I'd ask you to start from the assumption that the person in front of you belongs here until you actually know otherwise, and to find out the way you'd want someone to find out about you.
"That's it. I'll be on fourteen most of this afternoon. I'm the one in the jacket."
For a second nothing happened. Then the applause came, louder this time and stranger, with something under it, the murmur reappearing like a current under a surface. She heard it as she handed the microphone back to Gerald. She heard it as people stood, chairs scraping, and turned to one another. She heard a phrase or two. In the lobby. Badge. Did you hear. Not here. And then, from somewhere in the middle, a man's voice, too loud, quickly hushed: the jacket, though.
People began to drift. Dispatch surged toward her, a man with a grey beard and a headset first, holding out his hand and saying something about Fennick Harbor, about his brother-in-law who'd worked the cranes there. She shook it. She shook the next one, and the next. Over their shoulders she watched the room empty from the back, watched the rows break apart and the folding chairs left at angles, a coffee cup on one seat, a forgotten scarf on another.
Vanessa did not move. The people around her went, and the woman in the fleece touched her arm and said something and then, after a moment, went too, slowly, looking back once. Vanessa stood alone by the urns with the tote held in front of her and her chin still up. Nadia saw her right hand shift on the strap, saw the small wince, saw her take the weight onto the left.
Their eyes met across the emptying room. It lasted perhaps two seconds. Neither of them nodded. Neither of them looked away first. Then Celia was at the back of the room, beside Vanessa, speaking quietly, a hand not quite touching her elbow, and Vanessa turned toward her as if toward weather.