REBECCA’S POV
I needed three minutes.
That was all, three minutes away from the room, from the management of it, from the specific sustained effort of being exactly who I needed to be in every conversation while simultaneously tracking the temperature of forty people across the square footage of my own home. I had been running at full capacity for two hours and I needed three minutes at the edge of things to breathe without anyone reading the breathing.
I moved toward the far end of the room where the evening quieted slightly, a stretch of space near the bookshelves that had always been the room’s natural exhale point, far enough from the bar to feel separate, lit warmly but not brightly, the kind of corner that offered presence without performance. I stood with my back partially to
