She is not what she was in the coffee shop two years ago, which is to say she is not hollow. She has a job and a haircut and a certain flat steadiness that I recognized in about eleven seconds, because I have it too now and I know what it costs to get.

“I want to say two things first,” Emma said, before I had sat all the way down. “One, I’m not friends with you. This isn’t that. Two, I have a therapist and she thinks this is a bad idea and she may be right.”

“Understood.”

“Okay. Ask.”

I asked when it started, and she told me, and the answer moved everything.

She was twenty-two. She was an intern at Apex on a six-month placement that could convert to a full-time role, and the person who decided whether it converted was, functionally, Everett — not her direct manager, but the man whose sign-off the direct manager needed.