The week before the gala arrived with the specific texture of things that had been built toward for a long time — not the dramatic arrival of a deadline but the quiet intensification of everything that had been running in parallel, converging now into a single point.
Zara had a timeline on her desk that she had been updating daily since week one. By Monday morning of gala week it was color-coded, annotated, and accurate to the hour. She reviewed it at six-fifteen before anyone else was in the office, with her tea and the particular focused calm of someone who had prepared so thoroughly that the preparation itself had become a form of steadiness.
The gala was on Friday.
Five days.
She had run the numbers so many times they had become part of her internal architecture — sixty-three confi
