Theodora took a single step back.

Winston’s cigar slipped from his fingers and burned a small black scar into the teak.

Callum stood so fast his beer went over, and foam spread under the lounge chair across the pale wood, as though the afternoon had finally started spilling for someone other than me.

I watched twelve faces perform, in real time, the enormous arithmetic of revising who I was — the barista, the pretty nobody, the girl they had told to go below deck — into the person a Chief Legal Officer had just crossed a harbor to call Madam President.

It is a specific pleasure, watching that revision happen, and I will not pretend I did not feel it.

For eight months these people had looked at me and seen a category.