Through the conference-room glass, Steph could see Chad Nimms floundering. Chad was a tall, strapping kid—a skinnier Doug—but now nibbled his lip at the head of the table. His laptop was docked at the presenter's podium. He glanced between it and the 120-inch projection as though worried the two might be different.

Rich Hauser watched from up the table, jaw tight.

Rich didn't trust Chad with clients. Phrases like "wishy-washy" and "lacking gravitas" kept popping up in his reviews. Steph had done all she could pushing back against these critiques but knew if Chad laid an egg here, with Nike, Rich might well stick him in some back office, assigning him cold calls until he quit.

She paused at the threshold. Cracked her wrists, checked the lay of her blazer.

"My apologies, something came up that I wasn't able to move." She breezed to the front, passing behind men thirty years her senior. "Where are we? Ah, perfect—Chad has you into the nitty-gritty."

Steph touched Chad lightly on the back, assuming control of his trackpad. She launched into an explanation of a quadrant graph that plotted Nike against its competitors in the trail shoes category. Merrell, Saucony, Brooks—she cycled through each, addressing its market position and potential strategic responses.

"I don't see our dot," said the regional ad buyer, Nike's Man in the Room. "Where do we play, fashion/performance? Premium?"

Rich Hauser had relaxed as Steph's command performance had taken hold of the room, but his posture stiffened at this challenge.

Steph grinned. "You're Nike." Her eyes did not leave the buyer's as she tapped a PowerPoint key combo. A dozen tiny swooshes materialized. "You play everywhere."

The rest of the presentation went as smoothly. She guided skeptics toward helpful footnotes, offered to hash out particulars offline when discussion threatened to veer off into the weeds. As she drove the meeting, Steph felt the exhilaration of success. A revving in the gut. Adrenaline that grew with every admiring nod. The sensations seemed amplified by the visit to ETHS, where her achievement had begun—where the victories had been clear cut, unmoderated by the adult fog of money and job titles and diverging pursuits. High-school resumes require no interpretation. Valedictorian. Debate nationals.

Winner.

Chad Nimms had recovered two skin tones since Steph's arrival, but his eyes still droned ahead in a thousand-yard stare. Nevertheless, Steph turned his way at the Online Targeting section.

"I'll have Chad walk you through our success in digital. He's our subject matter expert."

Rich Hauser's face stormed over, and Chad too seemed surprised to hear his own number called.

Steph prompted, "The newsletter-tracking dashboard is something to see."

"R-right. Correct." Chad rose to the podium, blinked, and began his section as rehearsed.

He did fine. Steph had established authority, and Nike, primed to believe, did not question Chad's core point that Dunham & Prior was an industry leader in precision demo- and behavior-based online targeting.

"And that," Steph said, shutting the laptop on a final wrap-up slide, "is about the size of it. We're thrilled to be talking to you folks, can't wait to get this relationship rolling."

She faced Chad, who had hard copies of three versions of a Next Steps slide. Best practices at Dunham & Prior dictated you took the client's temp before making a proposal. If the reaction was tepid, you didn't want to toss out a large number and get laughed out of the room—but the other way, you hated to leave money on the table by presenting conservative figures to an audience that'd gone gaga over your stuff.

"Impressive," the Nike buyer said. "I'll have to steal that nifty scatterplot of yours next time I talk to Portland."

He winked at Steph. She was just indicating the stack of $10 million spend-level slides to Chad when the same voice added, less playfully, "We do need to set expectations here."

A funnel cloud appearing in the conference room's panoramic windows could not have had a darker impact than these words.

"Uh, sure—of course," Steph managed. "What did you have in mind?"

What he had in mind was a lot less than $10 million. A trial newsletter run, $75K to start, focused around prospective Outdoor Actives (eighteen to thirty-five, expressed interest in hiking and/or trail running).

"The launch campaign itself will be coordinated by our primary agency, Wieden+Kennedy." The buyer clicked his ballpoint off glossy cherrywood. "Naturally."

Steph squeezed the $10 million slides into a roll at the small of her back, feeling the partners' stares. Blood rushed to her face.

"Great." She willfully relaxed her shoulders. "No, that's fantastic, we welcome the opportunity to start small. Prove ourselves."

After Steph and the partners finished playing it off—"Super, just what we were hoping for"—and got contact info for Wieden + Kennedy, they shook hands with Nike and cleared out. Fortunately, there was a large partners meeting at four, so Steph was spared, for now, the obligatory postmortem with Rich Hauser.

She and Chad watched their visitors board town cars from the lobby.

"Too ambitious?" he said through a false grin. "Did we mess it up?"

"Our foot's in the door." Steph turned with a bracing breath. "Listen, Chad. I want to apologize for hanging you out to dry today. I put you in a tough spot. You did a nice job in there."

He shrugged. "I thought we had it."

"Me too."

The Nike fleet pulled away from the curb, disappearing into traffic. Steph experienced the sudden absence of stress—this momentous meeting weeks in the making, finally over—as yet another pressure. A dark idleness. Nothing is moving...the gears are stuck...time is passing, and you are standing still...

She knew this was nonsense, that plenty of accounts needed her attention. Quicken, PetSmart, Chicago municipal's pre-K pitch—they weren't Nike, but they weren't small potatoes either. There was work to do.

Chad, apparently thinking along the same lines, said, "Hey, I heard MetroBuild got through Evanston zoning last night."

"No kidding?"

"Yeah. Apparently, that dude—the one who shows up at every meeting to rant against the shoreline impact?—didn't show. They must be celebrating. Maybe a good time to pitch 'em?"

Steph agreed. They should start pulling together a media plan for the condos, and some B2B/trade-mag ideas for the mixed-use units. The billboard creatives were ready; he could find them on the shared drive.

She did not mention that "the dude" whose rantings had been holding up the development was her former teacher, Bob Fiske.