Her calendar was crammed with color-coded notes: vendor confirmations in blue, dinner reservations in green, hotel logistics highlighted in yellow. Each line of text represented hours of effort, every detail checked and re-checked until her eyes burned. Clara’s desk was a neat battlefield of sticky notes, highlighters, and to-do lists that she crossed off with quiet satisfaction. The travel binder she had assembled lay pristine and polished, the tabs crisp, the printouts flawless. She smoothed her palm over the cover before carrying it into Nicholas Wolfe’s office.
He looked up as she entered, that piercing gaze pinning her in place. The room was too quiet for her liking, the kind of silence that stretched taut around him, demanding composure from anyone who dared step inside. Clara set t
