The prep session was supposed to run an hour. It ran two, and by the end of it Josh had rewritten his own rules about what "professional distance" was reasonably supposed to look like three separate times, each revision a little more honest than the last about how badly the original version was holding.
"Walk me through the delegation Q&A again," he said, sitting across the table from her in the small conference room the department had started letting them use once the review sessions outgrew his office. "Specifically the storage durability question. If someone from the finance side asks you to defend the multi-day claim without the engineering vocabulary to follow a technical answer, what do you say?"
"I translate it into risk language instead of engineering language. Reliability isn't
