I prepared the way I prepared for everything: completely, in advance, with the particular focus that came from understanding that there was no version of this room I was walking into unprepared.
By Thursday I had sent Caroline the Edinburgh records, the licensing transfer documentation, and a four-page legal brief she had drafted and I had annotated with the precision of someone who had read every medical regulatory case involving alias enrollment in the past fifteen years, which I had done on Wednesday evening while Ethan did his homework at the kitchen table and asked periodic questions about whether a narwhal’s tusk was technically a tooth.
It was. I answered him and returned to the regulatory cases.
By Friday I had the character references. Not solicited through formal channels, not
