The press corps is fully assembled.”

I turned from the window and pulled my ivory blazer tight around my shoulders.

“Are all the major networks present?” “Every single one,” Maya smiled.

“And the tech investors for the new smartwatch safety-integration project are waiting in the front row.” “Good,” I said.

And I meant it, deeply, because of everything the new foundation would fund, the safety project was the one closest to my heart.

We were going to take the very technology that had saved my life, the ordinary smartwatch on an ordinary wrist, and we were going to build into it features designed to protect people in danger, to record, to broadcast, to summon help when a victim could not speak, so that what had saved me by pure desperate improvisation might one day save others by design.