I wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet.
But I thought it the whole walk home, our arms brushing once in the cold and neither of us
moving away, and I was still thinking it at midnight when I sat at my kitchen table with a
glass of water and the city quiet outside and something settled in my chest that had not
been settled in a very long time.
I went to bed. I slept better than I had in weeks.
And then the board started moving wrong on a Wednesday, and I noticed before anyone
else did.
Not dramatically. Not in the way of raised voices or formal objections or anything that would
have been easy to point at and name. It was subtler than that. A postponement request on
a subsidiary review. A procedural query filed twenty minutes before a scheduled vote. Two
board members who had been
