The investors were already talking when Aurora got back to her desk.
She could hear them through the laptop speakers — the specific, unhurried cadence of men who had not noticed her absence or had noticed it and decided not to acknowledge it, which amounted to the same thing professionally and was, in this particular moment, a mercy. She dropped into her chair, opened the document to the correct page, switched her microphone back on, and stepped back into the meeting with the seamless, composed re-entry of someone who had simply been consulting a reference.
"—as you can see from the Q3 projections," she said, without preamble, without apology, without any indication that thirty seconds ago she had been on her hands and knees on the study floor shoving papers aside with the frantic energy of someone who had run out of time and professionalism in equal measure.
