Nineteen minutes stood between the garage door closing behind his wife's Highlander and his first meeting, and he had timed it more than once. The pen lived in the nightstand drawer beside his reading glasses. He was forty-four, worked claims from the spare room, and had not been late to a call in three years. He did not think of it as a decision. He thought of it as Tuesday.

The coffee went cold on the nightstand most mornings; he made it anyway, because a man who makes coffee is a man with a morning. His work was fine. His reviews were fine. The only thing that had changed in four years was that he no longer had a plan for what the day would feel like if he skipped it, and he had stopped testing.