A Night of Reflection
The city is sleeping, mostly, but Vondrel’s office is wide awake. The hour is late enough that even the diehard deal-makers have called it quits, but the rain outside the windows is still busy, drawing silver streaks down the glass, blurring the skyline into something softer, dreamlike. The only light is from the lamp on his desk, a soft white globe meant to imitate sunlight, but fooling no one. The study is a monument to restraint: bookcases thick with leather-bound volumes, the kind that have never been read past the prologue; a desk that might as well be its own zip code; a pair of club chairs arranged for a conversation no one will ever have. The air smells of saddle soap, expensive cologne, and, tonight, the faint bite of ozone sneaking in through a cracked window. Vondrel sits behi
- Writer
