The flight home was the longest two hours of her life.
Not because anything happened. Because nothing did.
Ethan sat across from her in the private cabin with his laptop open and his coffee untouched and his eyes on his screen and he was so perfectly, completely normal about it that she wanted to throw something at him. The strategy team sat at the front of the plane talking about things she didn't track. Outside the window clouds moved past in slow indifferent formations. Inside the cabin the air had the specific quality of something being carefully managed.
She knew because she was managing it too.
She had her own laptop open. She had looked at the same slide for forty minutes. She was a grown woman who had built a company from nothing and survived a hostile acquisition and a literal
