The morning of the meeting, Lena woke early and lay still in the dark.
She did this sometimes — not by choice but by the habit of a brain that processed faster than her body did, that came online before she was fully conscious and delivered its working conclusions into the transitional space between sleep and waking. The conclusions arrived in no particular order, as conclusions often did, and she received them the way you receive weather: without control over its arrival, but with the choice of how to stand in it.
Conclusion one: today was going to change things.
Conclusion two: things needed to change.
Conclusion three: she was frightened.
Not the sharp, immediate fear of threat — more the diffuse, anticipatory fear of irreversibility. She had reached, in the last four days, the edg
