I make mistakes, correct them, make better ones. I learn which executives mistake politeness for softness and which ones mistake ruthlessness for vision. I learn to read a room before the first person speaks. I learn that silence deployed properly is not retreat but architecture.
I also learn to laugh again.
Real laughter this time.
At Naomi’s kitchen table. At Dolores’s outrageous opinions about St. Louis society. At myself when I accidentally wear two different heels to an internal strategy breakfast and no one notices because my presentation is too strong for anyone to stare downward.
Grief becomes less of a flood and more of a climate. It remains, but it stops drowning everything.
One Sunday in late May, almost three years after the will reading, I visit Margaret’s grave with fresh lilies and one of the quarterly reports she would have pretended not to care about before demanding every figure. The cemetery is quiet except for birds and distant traffic. The grass is impossibly green.
I kneel and set the flowers down.
“Well,” I say to the stone, “you were right about almost everything, which is deeply annoying.”
Wind moves through the trees.