Emily sat still and looked at the folder and then at the credit card. The card was face-up on the table between them, and she could see her own faint reflection in its surface—distorted, small. She thought about two years ago. She thought about the specific evening she had sat with Ethan in the kitchen of his apartment—a cramped, cluttered place he rented at the time, with a broken burner on the stove and cardboard boxes stacked in the hallway because he hadn’t finished unpacking eight months after moving in—and he had spread his business plan across the kitchen table and told her about his vision. He had been animated then, genuine, his eyes bright with the particular light of a person who believes in something completely. She had listened for two hours. Then she had gone through his numbers carefully, found three critical errors in his projections, suggested six adjustments to his pitch, and stayed up until three in the morning helping him rebuild his presentation from scratch.

He had gotten the meeting because of that presentation.