Later, Logan came to the maintenance bench.
“You saw that.”
Daniel kept sorting tools.
“Saw what?”
“You know.”
Daniel let him suffer for a second.
“You listened. Congratulations on meeting a normal leadership expectation.”
Logan laughed despite himself.
“You really do not make this satisfying.”
“Growth is usually boring from the outside.”
Then Logan looked toward the mud strip beyond the covered firing line.
“I owe you an apology.”
Daniel set down the tool.
Logan did not dramatize it.
He apologized for throwing the cloth, for using Daniel’s contractor status as permission to belittle him, and for refusing to listen because being corrected in public felt like losing control.
Daniel accepted.
“Now apologize to the supply specialist.”
“Already did.”
“Caleb?”
“Yesterday.”
Daniel nodded.
“Then we are done.”
The relationship between Caleb and Logan changed too. During supervised sessions, Logan began asking Caleb for an observation before giving his own. At first Caleb suspected another test. Eventually he understood that Logan was practicing something he had once treated as weakness: letting useful information arrive from below.
One windy morning, Caleb made a poor call and said so immediately.
Logan corrected it, then moved on.
Caleb waited for the public jab that used to follow mistakes. None came.
After the session he found Daniel at the maintenance bench.
“That was strange.”
“What was?”
“I was wrong and nobody made it into a personality problem.”
