Nick had already had an intern dump my pencil cups, my sticky notes, and my business cards into the trash.
Sitting at the center of the clean mahogany laminate was my framed photograph:
Clara, my wife, holding our two daughters, Maya and Chloe, on the porch of our small brick bungalow in Lakewood, their faces laughing into the summer sun, their arms wrapped around our golden retriever, Barnaby.
The glass of the frame had been cracked across the corner.
A deliberate, sharp pressure mark where someone had stepped on the frame before tossing it onto the desk.
Beside the broken frame lay my grandfather’s brass drafting compass—an antique maritime instrument forged from naval ordnance brass in nineteen-forty-two, which my grandfather had carried aboard a destroyer escort in the South Pacific.
The pivot screw had been loosened; the needle point was bent forty-five degrees.
I didn’t curse.
I didn’t pick up a chair and throw it through the glass partitions.
