I thought about Isolde Henrik Wolfe, who was going to arrive in April and had opinions already and was named for a woman who understood that things worth building are worth building correctly and had held out for three months to prove it.
"Yes," I said. "That's what I see."
He was very still.
"Then we don't need to wait for October," I said. "The contract had terms because I needed the terms. I needed the structure and the exit provisions and the page-eight clause and all the formal architecture of it, because I did not yet know whether this was safe." I held his gaze. "I know now. The structure did what it was supposed to do. We don't need it anymore."
"What do you need?" he said.
I thought about it. Genuinely. The way I thought about things that mattered — with the full attention, u
