When he looked at me, he did not see the awkward, severe, overlooked Josephine Pembroke that my family had spent thirty years constructing.

He saw a woman who could take apart a failing national economy in her head while her coffee cooled.

“You look,” he murmured to me during the worst stretch of the keynote, leaning close, his eyes bright with amusement, “like you’re calculating exactly how to buy the central bank so you can fire the chairman.”

“I’m calculating how long their market takes to collapse if I pull our holdings,” I said, without turning my head, and sipped my coffee.

“About four minutes.”