Joey’s new, partner-size office with an actual city view was being prepped down the hall. (The view was of another office building in Battery Park. But sunlight peeked between the office buildings at certain times, she’d heard.) Office fairies had installed her new nameplate as her partnership was being announced.

“Now I wish I could say take the day off.” Wish wasn’t a word you wanted to hear out of Mark Delisio’s lips. What followed was a string of semi-platitudes like last minute and it’s out of my hands.

At four the next morning, as Joey sat on the floor of her office, double-, triple-, quadruple-checking the myriad org charts and agreements that had to be reviewed and signed at eight A.M. by a client launching his new hedge fund, her chest arrested.

I’m having a heart attack, she thought. Her second thought was, I hate my life.

That she hated her life came as a surprise to Joey. When I make partner, I will love my life, she’d told herself all along. I’ll be able to save for a West Village walk-up. I’ll take more vacations. I’ll go to Bali. I’ll have more sex. Better sex. More discriminate sex.

That she’d made partner and still didn’t feel happy was surprising.

Joey glanced at the blue sheets of paper they used to fasten the agreements. She stapled four sheets together. Then she thrust an agreement across the room. The pages fell in a disappointing heap on the carpet, only one paper poking out, not even out of order. Joey grabbed a permanent marker from her table, sending pens flying across the cherrywood. She wrangled the floral arrangement to the floor. It smelled like summer. Like the outdoors.

What were those things?

Joey sprawled on the floor and began to sketch. After some time, she filled all four stapled sheets so she added new ones. Eventually, there wasn’t enough floor space. She moved chairs to the hallway. She wedged her bookcase between her desk and a file cabinet. Her hand flew across the sheets. When Mark walked into her office the next morning, she knew he was there because his $1,500 John Lobbs approached her blue canvas. She didn’t look up.

“What’s going on, Abrams?”

She didn’t try to conceal her painting. It was jammed with evil eyes. Scrawny ones and bloated ones. The evil eyes she’d started to draw back in Corfu. “I think I’ll be taking some days off, Mark.”

“How many days?”

“All of the days.” She stood, suddenly extraordinarily happy. “All of the days in the future, I’ll be taking off.”

She collected her blue sheets of paper and followed security out of the building. She put her things in storage and went to Bali the next week.