She arrived with three spreadsheets. The first showed twelve years of business growth. The second showed her personal finances. The third was a list of every personal expense she had paid for other people in the previous twenty-four months. The figure at the bottom of that third spreadsheet was what she had come to talk about.

She said she was here because she was tired. She had been using the word for eleven years. What happened on a Thursday afternoon in her kitchen, three weeks later, broke a sixteen-year pattern.

She said yes to her husband in English within ninety seconds, then cried every morning for three months in a bathroom in Geneva. What she discovered, at thirty-eight, was that each of the three languages she spoke fluently carried a different permission structure, and the language in which she could refuse had been the one she had been slapped for using at three.

She made partner at the youngest age in her firm's history, then walked into her managing partner's office one Thursday and resigned. What she discovered, in the months before, was that her mother had been waiting forty years for her to stop apologising for a career she had been told was the inheritance.