LENA

I had been to events my entire professional life.

This is what I told myself on the car ride over, in the specific internal voice I used for the management of situations that required me to be composed before I had fully finished becoming composed. I had organized galas and benefit dinners and silent auctions and seated receptions for three hundred people in rooms that had required months of planning and attention and the particular discipline of someone who understood that the difference between an event that worked and an event that merely happened was invisible to everyone except the person who had made it invisible. I had been...