The EchoTech offices were on the fourth floor of a building on West Fifth Street.
Mia had been in them once before — six years ago, a week after the equity agreement was signed, when Ethan had taken her up to show her the empty space he was about to rent. They had stood in the middle of an unfinished floor with plastic sheeting over the windows and he had said: *this is where it starts.* She had turned slowly, looking at the raw ceiling, the exposed ducts, the city visible in strips through the gaps in the plastic, and she had thought: yes. It does.
She had not been back since.
She walked through the lobby on a Thursday morning in December with Patricia on her left, Nathan on her right, and a board resolution in a folder that confirmed her status as EchoTech's largest individual equity
