LENA

Nate told me at ten-seventeen on a Wednesday morning.

I knew the exact time because I had been looking at the clock on my computer when my phone buzzed on the desk, a reflex check of the hour in the specific and automatic way of a woman who tracked time in increments as a matter of professional habit, and the time had registered in the peripheral and unremarkable way of a piece of information that would not have been significant except that it became, in the seconds that followed, the specific and fixed point around which everything else in the morning reorganized itself.

Ten-seventeen.

The text was from Nate....