Corbin visited the diner exactly once, some months after it opened, and he did not announce himself or sit at a place of honor; he took a stool at the counter like any other customer, and ordered eggs and coffee, and looked, for a long moment, at the photograph of Nathan Prescott in his work gear and the small plaque beneath it. Speak up when something is not right. Five words.

It struck him that Nathan had lived and died by exactly those five words, and that the entire catastrophe had come from a single, simple failure — not a failure of engineering, or of finance, or of law, but a failure to listen to a man who had spoken up.

Nathan had done the hard part.

He had seen the danger, and named it, and put his name to the naming, which is the thing most people cannot bring themselves to do, because speaking up is frightening and inconvenient and rarely rewarded, and staying quiet is so easy.

The tragedy of Bayview was never that no one knew.