Lianna looked at him with a serious, thoughtful expression, and then she said the thing that Corbin would carry with him into every board meeting for the rest of his career.

“Don’t keep changing this company because you feel guilty about my family,” she said.

He waited.

“Do it for the next worker whose name you don’t know yet.” And that reframed the whole of it for him, cleanly and permanently.

Guilt was about the past, and about him — a debt owed to the Prescotts, payable and, once paid, finished.

But Lianna was pointing him at something that did not end: the next warning, on the next job site, from the next man or woman who would see a danger and name it and need someone in power to listen.

Guilt would have let him fix the Bayview wrong and consider the matter closed.