Elena blinked. “You know about that?”
“Everyone in the field knows. Most people remember the dramatic part. I remember that you insisted on conceptual accuracy under pressure. That is rarer.”
He offered to connect her with a research consortium if she ever wanted to return to academia. Elena thanked him and meant it, but when she later told Ruth over the phone, Ruth only said, “Nice. But don’t go romanticizing institutions that lost your number when your life got hard.”
Ruth had a way of slicing through sentimentality with grandmotherly precision.
The first time Elena saw Wittmann again after joining Han Innovations was at a logistics conference in Dallas. He approached her near a coffee station between panels, no entourage, no television smile, just a man in a very expensive suit holding a paper cup like it might be evidence.
“Ms. Wilson,” he said.
“Mr. Wittmann.”
He gave a rueful half-smile. “Richard is fine, if you can tolerate it.”
She raised one eyebrow.
“That’s fair,” he said. “I deserved that.”
People changed, Elena had learned, but not usually in dramatic leaps. More often they shifted in increments their own pride could endure. Wittmann was still arrogant. Still sharp-edged. Still built for control. But the theatrical contempt had been forced inward, where it now seemed to be doing some work on him.
“I wanted to thank you,” he said. “Not just for the correction. For refusing to let me keep pretending I was the smartest man in the room by default.”
