He had spent our whole working relationship secure in the assumption that I was small and he was large, that the hierarchy between us was fixed and obvious.

And now something had entered that hierarchy that he could not read, a binder with my name on it and photographs and legal seals, and it had frightened him, and the fear had rearranged him.

He did not yet know what it meant.

But he could feel, the way an animal feels a change in the weather, that the ground had shifted, and that the girl he had shortchanged the night before might not be who he had assumed she was.

Chapter 9 — The Back Office