I counted the people ahead of us, doing the math in my head as I tried to figure out how long the line might take, plus the minutes spent eating, and then the walk back to the office. Fifty-two minutes at least, which cut it close to the call I had scheduled about possibly expanding to a Seattle office. Plus, I was leaving work early tonight for a dinner honoring what we’d done last year revolutionizing the environmental investing space. And there was a six-mile run penciled into my calendar for five forty-five tomorrow morning that I never missed. I took a deep breath, trying to recalibrate and remember that family time was important too.

“Let me guess—another write-up in the New York Times? Too much money being made?” Perrine was so altruistic and kind and painfully polite that most people had no idea how damn sarcastic she really was. Lucky for me, I’d had a front-row seat to her many contradictions my whole life. “And where’s your jacket, by the way? Did someone dare you to leave the office without it?”

She also never missed a thing. I gave her the rundown of my weird morning on the subway in a few short sentences. When I finished, her face had gone from unimpressed to utterly baffled.

“Wait, explain this to me again.” She had stopped fiddling with her hospital ID badge that hung from her scrubs to stare at me, her head cocked to the side. “Her dress caught in the subway doors and ripped? Dear god, what a nightmare. That’s like having your fly down in front of the whole class at school, but a million times worse. Remember when you—”

“Please don’t,” I interrupted before she could continue with the story of me accepting the Senior Prize in Mathematics in front of our entire high school with toilet paper coming out of the back of my pants. She’d told the whole story in mortifying detail in her toast at my rehearsal dinner. I didn’t need to hear it again. “Okay, so if I am following this correctly, you gave her your jacket. A stranger?”

“I told you,” I said as the line moved forward an inch. “I was only trying to help. It was no big deal.”

I shook my head, exasperated, and paused to order, finally—arugula, beets, cucumber, grilled tempeh, lemon vinaigrette. The man working behind the counter nodded in recognition. It was the same thing I ordered every day.

“You know, you really should try something else,” Perrine teased, poking me in the ribs with a laminated menu. “Chickpeas or avocado. Or, oh, I know, maybe add some cheese. Now that would be wild.”