The panic attack came without warning on a Wednesday evening, which was when things she had not planned for tended to arrive.
She had been working late, finishing an illustration that had given her trouble all week — a complex architectural cross-section for a design publication, the kind of technical work that required sustained precision and left no margin for a wandering mind. She had been holding herself very together all day, which was itself a warning sign she had learned to recognise too late. The holding-together always preceded the falling-apart.
The trigger was small. She picked up her phone to check the time and there was a notification from the search alert she had set for Hale Foundation news, and the headline was about a retrospective piece in a business journal about devel
