Lena Badu sat at Ren's table and looked at twelve people who had been expecting eleven.
She looked at each face carefully — not anxious, not overwhelmed. The look of a person who had been alone for eight months and was taking inventory of a room with twelve people in it because inventory was what you did when the context changed and you needed to understand the new context accurately before you responded to it.
She looked at the timeline wall last. She read it the way everyone read it — slowly, from left to right, following the red and black lines through three years of Ren's work.
Then she looked at Ren.
You built this alone, she said.
For three years, Ren said. Yes.
She looked at the wall again.
I can add to it, she said. The program's internal communications that I had access to
