Option two: accept the booking without telling Daniel until he showed up and saw me at the front of the room. This was tempting in a way I am not proud of. The thought of his face walking in and seeing me at the podium had a certain satisfaction to it. It also would have been a workplace ambush, which would have made me the problem and given him a legitimate grievance, and I was not willing to hand him that.
Option three: tell Daniel about the booking, confirm with Julia, prepare and deliver the workshop like the professional I am. Deal with the family situation separately, directly, on my own terms.
Option three was the right answer. I knew it on the walk. I came home and accepted the booking and then I sat down with Daniel and told him what had happened.
## The Conversation I Had With Daniel
He was in the kitchen making pasta when I came in. I sat at the table, which is where we have the conversations that are not casual, and I told him the training coordinator at Northbridge had booked me for the June training day through the Midwest Operations Alliance speaker directory.
He stopped stirring.
“What?”
“Your company booked me for an operations workshop. I’m confirmed. June fourteenth, half day, your whole team plus a few people from facilities.”
He turned around. The expression on his face was not anger. It was something more complicated — a look I have seen on Daniel’s face before in moments that require him to process something quickly, a kind of internal scrambling.