I was rusty.

I had not sat across a desk and talked about campaigns and clients and creative strategy in twelve years, and for the first twenty minutes I could feel my own nerves like a hand around my throat.

And then something loosened, and the old fluency came back, the part of my mind that had lain folded up in a drawer for over a decade, and I remembered that I had been good at this once, genuinely good.

They offered me the position: associate director, at seventy-five thousand dollars a year.