She introduced me to little neighborhood restaurants and insisted we walk by the lake without our phones.

In my apartment she made a shelf for battered books beside a wall of glass and steel.

I began to imagine weekends when work could wait.

Then the Calloway Center project began to fail.

An investor threatened to walk, an overseas lender demanded revised guarantees, and my father was hospitalized.

I disappeared into conference rooms.

I missed dinners, then birthdays, then an anniversary that Elena spent alone.

The night she asked whether I wanted a family, I said I couldn’t discuss hypothetical children with two hundred jobs on the line.