Reading Aloud

Too much

Dog

The cabin was dark, business-class dark, the kind of darkness you pay eleven hundred dollars extra for. The engines had settled into that long monotonous hum that airlines use, he suspected, to keep people from thinking too hard about physics. He had the window. She had the aisle. Their elbows were sharing the armrest like two countries sharing a disputed border, and neither side was calling in the diplomats.

The morning began with a broken shoelace.

I took the leather chair, the good one, the one clients probably fought over. My briefcase sat by my feet, black and locked, like it had secrets of its own. The room smelled like a law library after a flood: old paper, and under it, rain.