She noticed his hands first.
That was how she knew she was in trouble — not the big things, not the moments that should have registered, but the small unremarkable detail of his hands. She was watching him sign something Clara had brought in during a meeting on Monday morning and she noticed the way he held the pen and something in her chest did a thing she immediately refused to acknowledge.
She looked back at her own notes.
She was fine. She was absolutely fine. She was a grown woman who had survived thirty-seven investor rejections and a hostile acquisition and a literal fire and she was not going to be undone by a man's hands.
She was not fine.
It had started on Saturday. She could trace it back to that with uncomfortable precision — the accidental market, the breakfast place with
