Riley had not expected to come in on a Saturday.
She had planned, in the vague and optimistic way of someone who worked too many weekday evenings to fully commit to weekend plans, to sleep late, to make proper breakfast rather than the rushed coffee-and-whatever she subsisted on during the week, to perhaps walk the cove path if the rain let up and read something that was not a brief or a campaign review. She had planned a version of herself who existed outside the Obsidian Spire for two consecutive days.
Then her laptop had pinged at eight with an automated reminder about the Monday pitch deck, the one she had been adding to all week in small increments and which was, she now realised with the particular clarity of Saturday morning, not as complete as she had been telling herself it was. She had stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes and then gotten up and gotten dressed and come in, because that was what she did, and because the pitch deck was not going to finish itself.
