[...] They were young, still in their early twenties. They had decades to figure it out. She wanted to edit books. To have an office with floor to ceiling bookcases, a vase of fresh flowers near a wall of thank-you notes from famous authors. She wanted conversations at restaurants that made her blood course faster, that gave her brain the spins. She wanted to be at the edge of things, to feel the feeling a book gave to you when it did something new and lively, when it bent the conversation away from itself, away from its expected course, and made new air. Was it a kind of mother-instinct to want this? Maybe, and maybe it would be enough for her. This future pulled at her. She wanted to use her mind. Her mind was a restless things. It had a clock of its own. [...]