I didn't sleep again.
This was becoming a pattern that my body would eventually invoice me for, but at ten PM, with the contract amendment notification still on my screen and the library chair doing its best to be comfortable, sleep felt like a concept that applied to people who weren't currently sitting with the specific weight of a unilateral decision made by a man in a study forty feet away.
He'd removed the end date.
I kept returning to that fact the way you returned to something that didn't resolve, not because it was painful, but because it was significant in a way that required repeated examination before it could be absorbed. Adrian Knight, who negotiated everything, who had a clause for every contingency, who had prepared a contract three weeks before I walked into his office,
