“What happened to you?” he asked. Not loud, but it commanded every square inch of the room.

The receptionist scrambled to intervene. “Mr. Pierce, she was scheduled for an interview, but she arrived very late and, as you can see, entirely unprepared—”

I kept my eyes on him. “I was prepared when I left home.”

“Then what changed, Ms. Bellamy?”

He knew my name.

“A storm drain on East Mercer flooded,” I said, my voice steadying into a debriefing cadence. “Traffic gridlocked. I got out to run. Then I heard a child screaming — a boy, maybe seven. His dirt bike had slid down the embankment, and he was pinned against a grate in a flash-flood runoff system. The water was rising fast. He was going under.”