“Simone?

It’s midnight.

Is everything all right?”

“Corinne.

I need you to activate the voting proxy for the Whitman Tech trust, first thing in the morning.” My voice came out level and cold and very calm, a voice I had not used in years and found, to my surprise, still fit me perfectly.

That was the thing that unsettled me most, in the quiet after I hung up: not that I could do it, but that it came back so whole.

I had assumed, in the vague way you assume things about a self you have set aside, that the competent version of me had rusted somewhere in the five years of disuse — that I would have to relearn her, dust her off, rebuild her from the studs.