Eight months in, the invisible became visible. And I was ready for it.
The message from my attorney came on a Wednesday morning while I was in the back of a cab on my way to a supplier meeting, three words on my screen that arrived like a stone dropped into still water. Call me now. No greeting. No punctuation. From a woman who had never once wasted a syllable in all the time I had known her, three words without punctuation meant something had shifted and it had shifted today.
I told the cab driver to pull over. Called her from the pavement with the city moving past me in both directions, loud and indifferent.
“They have flagged it,” she said, before I finished saying her name.
My stomach did not drop. My hands did not shake. I had prepared for this moment with the same precision I had
