The hour she'd asked for turned into two, which she spent at a café near the Praça do Comércio with the river in sight and a coffee that she actually finished, watching the Tagus do what it always did: receive everything and continue.
She called her mother.
Not Leonardo, not Bianca — her mother, which was what you did when something had happened that needed to go into the person who'd been present at the beginning of you.
"Tell me," her mother said.
She told her. The board conversations, the man in the expensive suit, the specific quality of naming the thing and watching the room change around it.
"You were afraid going in," her mother said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"And coming out?"
She thought about it.
"No," she said. "Something else. I don't know the word yet."
"You'll find it,
