I wrote them down on a notepad and looked at them for a while and then put the notepad in a drawer because I didn’t need to keep looking at them. They were already in my head. They’d been in my head for a while.
On the morning of the meeting I went for a walk. I do this when I’m working through something — not as a mindfulness practice, just as a thing that helps me think when I can’t sit still. I walked for forty minutes, past the coffee shop and the park and the dry cleaner I keep meaning to go to. I thought about what I was going to say and how.
By the time I got back to my apartment I felt ready. Not calm exactly. Ready.
Olivia, Revised
I want to return to Olivia because she deserves more space in this account than I’ve given her.
When I met her for coffee and told her I hadn’t volunteered, I was watching her closely — not in a suspicious way, just in the way you watch someone who is processing important information in real time. She went through several visible adjustments in about ten minutes.
First: surprise. Not performed surprise — the actual rearrangement of expectations.
Second: a kind of careful reassessment of things she thought she’d known. I could see her running back through conversations, probably, checking them against this new information.
Third: something that I read as frustration, though she expressed it quietly. “I wish I’d known that before we gave them a different number.” Not aimed at me. Aimed at the situation.