The gala had a pool.
This was, I had come to understand, a Drax Industries thing. The charitable foundation had a particular fondness for aquatic venues, hotels with rooftop pools converted for evening events, the kind of space that allowed for both formal proceedings and the visual drama of water at night. This one was on the fortieth floor of a building in midtown, the pool lit from beneath, the city visible on three sides through floor-to-ceiling glass, and the whole arrangement was exactly as spectacular as it sounds and exactly as calculated.
I had been to enough of these evenings to move through them without effort. I knew the names, the affiliations, the specific conversational landmines of each person in the room, and I navigated all of it with the ease of someone who had been pa
