He nodded, like that confirmed something. Then he said, “I read two paragraphs of something that fell out of your bag that night. Before I could stop myself.” He reached into his jacket and held out a folded paper. My concept paper. The one I had been working on for three weeks, the idea that had been sitting in my head for longer than that, the thing I had written at two in the morning after a double shift when I couldn’t sleep and needed to put it somewhere outside of myself.
I took it from him slowly.
“I should not have read it,” he said. “But I did. And I have one question.”
I waited.
“Why haven’t you launched this?”
Not what are you planning to do with this. Not this is interesting, have you thought about. Just that. Direct and specific, the way you ask something when you already
