She was on forty-two at seven fifty-eight.
Not because she had been summoned. Damien had asked
if she was free at eight and she had said yes and she was here because she had made a decision somewhere between the pasta and the wine and the particular quiet of her Brooklyn apartment that she was not going to let him walk into a nine o'clock meeting about her without being present for the preparation of it.
She had thought about that on the subway this morning. About the instinct to be peripheral to things that were about her, to let other people manage situations that had her name in them, to stay in her lane and trust the process and all of the other reasonable professional behaviors that were sometimes wisdom and sometimes just a more sophisticated version of making yourself small.
Sh
