She arrived with wine, dressed appropriately, said the right things to the right people. Marjorie hugged her immediately and without reservation, in the way Marjorie always did — no calculation, no waiting to see how the room was arranged — which was the one reliable comfort of events like this. Trevor and Kayla were polite in the guarded way of people who knew they were in someone else’s story and were trying not to pick sides. Raymond was a large man in his early sixties with the confidence of someone who had confused volume with authority for so long that the distinction had genuinely ceased to exist for him.
He had shaken Leah’s hand at the door and looked at her with the faint impatience of a man who had already categorized her and was moving on.
She had smiled and gone in.
Leah had been working in cybersecurity for four years. She had started as an in-house analyst at a regional bank, moved to contract work after her second year because the money was better and the scope was broader, and had spent the past two years building a client list that included a hospital system, two insurance carriers, a mid-size pharmaceutical company, and the healthcare compliance firm currently paying her to trace a specific data exposure. She worked odd hours, kept meticulous records, and had once spent eleven days documenting a supply-chain vulnerability for a client who subsequently had to notify forty thousand patients that their billing information had been accessible to unauthorized parties for a period of months.
She did not describe this as playing around on the internet.
Nobody who understood it would.
But explaining it to Raymond over his roast was not what she had arrived prepared to do, because she had not expected to need to. She had expected a dinner. She had received a demonstration.
Raymond carved his roast and kept talking, because men like Raymond were always in the middle of a speech. He spoke about his generation, real jobs, benefits, offices, the discipline required by the old ways, before everyone decided they could stay home in their pajamas and claim to be building something.
Trevor laughed. Kayla hid a smile behind her wineglass. Marjorie looked at her plate with the practiced neutrality of someone who had spent decades surviving other people’s cruelty by appearing not to hear it.
Leah set down her fork.
“I’m a cybersecurity consultant,” she said.