I hung up and sat down at the kitchen counter. Emma placed a plate in front of me three perfectly golden pancakes, sliced banana, a drizzle of honey. She poured two mugs of coffee, black for me, oat milk for her, and sat on the stool beside me, her bare knee touching mine.
"See?" she said. "The world didn't end because you took a morning off."
"The world might end if Chelsea score in the first five minutes because I wasn't there to drill the defensive shape."
"Then Sarah will fix it. She's brilliant."
"She is brilliant."
"So trust her. Trust all of them. You built this machine, Danny. The whole point of a machine is that it runs without you standing over it every second of every day."
She was right again. The machine the staff, the system, the culture was not fragile. It did not require my constant, anxious presence to function. Sarah could run a recovery session in her sleep.
