LENA

I almost didn't go out.

I want to be precise about this because the precision matters, because the specific and particular fact of how close I came to not going out to the terrace that evening is part of the story in a way that the story requires me to be honest about. I had been inside all day. The gala meeting had run long in the specific and exhausting way of meetings that had no natural endpoint, that continued past the point of their usefulness because the people in them had not yet said everything they needed to be seen saying, and I had come back to the...