The Frame
Is Not Destiny

Maya had brought proof.

Not feelings. Not complaints. Not a vague sense that she was tired. Proof.

She had the delivery numbers, the client emails, the risk log, the weekend escalations, and the three projects she had pulled back from the edge before anyone above her knew they were close to falling.

She had even rehearsed how to say it without sounding defensive.

That was Maya’s specialty: preparing for other people’s discomfort.

She was thirty-six, a senior project manager at a technology services company that had grown quickly enough to impress investors and badly enough to exhaust the people inside it. The website said the company was agile. The people who worked there used other words in private.