“I get that. I used to work in an office and I definitely felt like a lot of the company-wide policies were pretty infantilizing. It was like we couldn’t be trusted not to burn the place down if we didn’t sign the HR handbook when we got hired.”

“Exactly.”

“So, you worked over the last few days. And I’m assuming you put in many hours on your webcomic, otherwise I’m going to have a stroke.”

“Yes. Deep breaths. I finished almost an entire chapter.”

“Excellent. Did you do anything else?”

“I hung out with my sister yesterday after work.”

“Vera, right?”

“Yeah . . . it was unplanned. I just happened to run into her at a restaurant we both like.”

“How’d it go? You sound a little weird about it.”

“Well, she said something that’s been bothering me, actually. Where do I start? Okay. Well, she’s got this big expo thing coming up in a few weeks, and I’ve been helping her plan parts of it out.”

“She’s running the expo?”

“No, no. She’s a participating vendor for her care package subscription service. It’s really cool. And her business is just starting to take off. I’m really proud of her. But last night it seemed like she was really struggling with some of the organizational parts of it, and I offered to help her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, she was, like, mortally offended that I’d offered to help, and then she called me Mr. Perfect and herself Ms. Cut-Up. And then I literally choked on my drink.”

“Because you don’t think those labels are accurate?”

“Are you kidding? Do I need to tell you the Vegas story again? I’m the biggest cut-up there is. I could win the Cut-Up Olympics.”

“Yeah, well, Vera doesn’t know that story, does she?”

“. . . No. I kept it from everybody.”

“So, all she knows is that you’re this successful, well-oiled machine, right?”

“I mean . . . I guess that’s true. But I always considered myself to be so transparent, so clumsy, that I guess I just figured she knew how hard it was for me to get where I am today.”

“You know, this might sound obvious, but one of the downsides to making it look easy is that no one ever knows how hard it was.”

“Ha. Yeah. Wow. I always wanted it to look easy. But maybe an unintended side effect was that when things got hard for Vera, she figured she was doing something wrong, because it all seemed so easy for me. I . . . never thought about it that way.”

“Would you ever tell her about Vegas?”