LukeMara's phone rang at the two-hour mark, and she was out of the room in ninety seconds."Five minutes," she said to Patricia. She didn't look at me.She was gone for fourteen.The associates continued working. I looked at my notes. The same page I'd been looking at for forty minutes, the tranche documentation, the cross-reference I'd already resolved, the words I was reading without reading because the thinking I was actually doing was somewhere else entirely.The door opened.Billy walked in.He stopped at the threshold and assessed, the way he always does: room first, people second, then me. And whatever conclusion the assessment produced, he decided to proceed."Mom said to wait here," he said. "Mix-up with pickup.""She's on a call," I said."I know." He came to the table. Sat two chairs down. Put the notebook on the table and opened it with the settled composure of a child who'd
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