The bathroom door was the only one in the house with a lock that still caught, and from 8:40 to 9:05 the shower was the one place a two-year-old could not follow her. In there she restructured everything: the hours, the ask for the raise, the conversation with her mother, the exact opening sentence of the resignation email. The water stayed hot the entire time.

By the time she was dry and had found a clean shirt, the plan had thinned into something that sounded like complaining, and there was a bottle to make. She was thirty-six, four years at the pharmacy counter. She had arrived at the same three conclusions in that shower since the spring, and had never once carried one of them out through the door.