As she took a seat in front of David’s desk, she noticed, with a quick stab of dread, that there were coffee cups and a few plates of half-eaten pastries stacked up on a table in the corner. This had to mean there had been a meeting here this morning, one to which she had not been invited. David was still pacing, had made no moves toward sitting down, and aside from mumbling a few words of greeting, was being unusually silent.

“Meeting?” she asked, desperate to break the ice.

He stopped pacing and stared at her for a moment, apparently trying to decide how to respond, stroking his wispy goatee with his index finger. “Chloe told you?”

That cleared up that suspicion: Chloe was now officially inside a loop she’d been booted out of. She indicated the table with her chin. “I was guessing.”

“Ah.” He seemed to be relieved by this and sat at his desk. “Good guess.”

“I assume it wasn’t anything that concerns me, because I assume that if it were something that concerned me, I naturally would have been included. Especially since you were serving breakfast.”

He put an arm across his chest, rested his chin in his hand, and scrutinized her. In a matter of seconds, she saw the look of restive discomfort and apology melt off his face, replaced by a look of barely controlled contempt, and she understood her tactical error. She was living up to her reputation for being hard-edged and sarcastic. Difficult. And in doing so, she was making his job infinitely easier than it would have been if she’d played against type and sat there like a wounded bird.

He let his hands drop to his desk and rose up taller in his chair, puffed up on self-righteousness. “The meeting concerned a lot of people, Jane.” He nodded at her and arched one eyebrow, as if to put her in her place.

She’d been told, by more than one person, that she never knew her place. “Including me, correct?”

“Yes, including you.”

“And I wasn’t told about it.”

All those years with Dr. Berman had at least produced some shred of self-awareness. She knew very well what she was doing here: Trying to divert attention away from the significant issue—the content of the meeting to which she pointedly had not been invited—and onto the irrelevant insult of not having been included. Trying to give herself a moment of reprise before he told her what he was going to tell her, which was, obviously, that Dinner Conversation was about to grind to an official stop.

“I called you up here now to tell you about the meeting, Jane. Do you want to hear about it?”