I hate dogs.

I want to open with that, clearly, in writing, so that later — and there is going to be a later, there is going to be a lot of later — nobody can say I wasn't upfront about my position from the very beginning.

I hate dogs. I hate the barking. I hate the shedding. I hate the way people talk to them in a voice they would be embarrassed to use on an actual baby. I have never once looked at a dog and thought I would like that in my apartment. This has been true for twenty-nine consecutive years.

As of 2:45 PM today, I have one.

I don't know what to do about it.

I want to be clear that this is not a metaphor. I am not being dramatic, or using "dog" as some kind of therapy-speak for a difficult coworker or an unresolved trauma. As of 2:45 PM today, in a very literal, very fur-covered sense, I have a dog, and I am the one who put him there, and I have fourteen days to undo it before it becomes permanent. I'd like to explain, in order, from the beginning of the day, because in order is the only way I can currently stand to tell it, and because I have a feeling that if I skip to the end you won't believe me, and I need you to believe me, because I am going to need somebody to.

It started with the matcha.

I want that on the record too. There's a place two blocks from the office, no sign, just a green awning and a woman named Priya who has seen the worst version of my Tuesdays for three years running and no longer asks how I'm doing, she just asks "extra?" and I say yes, and she makes it extra, meaning she uses almost double the recommended amount of ceremonial-grade matcha powder in a twelve-ounce oat milk base, which is either self-care or a slow-motion suicide attempt depending on how you look at it, and this morning I got it, and I drank exactly half, standing at the counter, because Priya was telling me about her nephew's dentist appointment, and then I carried the other half up to the office in my left hand for the rest of the morning, and it sat on my desk going lukewarm and then cold and then, eventually, ambient-temperature-forever, the way it always does, because I order it every single day and finish about half of it every single day and there is, right now, in my office, a small colony of abandoned iced matcha cups that a braver woman than me would have thrown out weeks ago.

I tell you this because I want you to understand the state I was in. Fully caffeinated on paper. Actually running on fumes. This is, structurally, how most of my worst days begin.

I did my breathing in the elevator. Four counts in, hold for four, four counts out. I have been doing this exercise since I was twenty-two years old and a therapist named Dr. Okonkwo-Reyes, who I saw for exactly six sessions before my insurance changed, taught it to me as a grounding technique, and I have used it in that elevator, in that specific elevator, more times than I have used it anywhere else on earth, because that elevator is where I do the last of my bracing before I become Sabrina At Work, who is a very different, much flatter, much more efficient woman than Sabrina In The Elevator.

My family does not do subtle emotions. This is not a personality quirk, it is closer to a structural engineering problem. When my aunt Carol gets upset, actually upset, not annoyed-upset but grief-upset, things around her get a little too warm. When my mother is furious, house-plants within a twelve-foot radius drop their leaves like it's an act of protest. When I was fourteen, at a Thanksgiving I am not going to describe in full because I still, fifteen years later, cannot fully look at a tablecloth without a small cold feeling in my stomach, my aunt's grief over a divorce she wasn't ready to talk about turned linen and a centerpiece into ash in front of eleven relatives and a family friend who has never come back to a holiday since.

I decided, that day, watching the ash settle onto the good china, that I would never be the reason a room needed repainting. I was extremely successful at this decision for fifteen years. I want that acknowledged, on the record, before we get to the part where it stops being true.

Which brings me to the review.

Performance reviews at my firm happen in a glass conference room on the nineteenth floor that has, I am fairly sure, been specifically designed to make the person being reviewed feel like an animal at a very tasteful zoo. Julian conducts them from the head of the table even when there are only two of us in the room, which there always are, because apparently a witness would ruin the vibe.

Julian is my manager. I want to describe him accurately, without cruelty, in the spirit of fairness, before things happen to him that I am not, strictly, sorry about. He is thirty-four. He irons his own shirts, including the sleeves, in creases so sharp you could hurt yourself on them, and once told a room full of interns, unprompted, that he considers himself "a systems thinker," which is a sentence that means nothing and yet somehow explained him completely.

He opened the review by telling me how proud he was of what "the team" had accomplished on Whitfield.

I built Whitfield. I want to be extremely specific about this, because specificity is the only thing I have left at this point. I found the lead. I wrote the cold email, at 11:47 PM on a Sunday, because I could not stop thinking about the pitch angle and needed it out of my head before I could sleep. I ran four rounds of numbers Julian never asked to see. I sat across from a man who does not trust consultants on principle and slowly, over six weeks, earned enough of his trust that he signed a seven-figure retainer. Julian's involvement in Whitfield, at time of signing, consisted of one forwarded email and the phrase "great work, keep me posted."

"Really proud of the synergy here," Julian said, tenting his fingers the way he does when he wants to look thoughtful on camera even though there is no camera. "This is exactly the kind of collaborative energy I want to see more of on this floor."

I smiled. Four counts in.

"And Sabrina," he said, and I want you to notice, please, that he said my name like he was about to give me something, "one note, and I say this with love. You'd go further if you smiled more. You've got real leadership potential in you. You just come across a little... flat."

Hold for four.

I would like to tell you I saw it coming. I would like to tell you there was a warning, a tremor, some small sign in the base of my spine that said not today, not here, hold on a little longer. There wasn't. There was just Julian's mouth, still moving, saying something about "executive presence," and then there was a sound like a match struck several hundred times at once, and a flash of light the exact color of the inside of your eyelids when the sun is too bright, and a smell — I need you to understand this part specifically — a smell exactly like a birthday candle that has taken something personally.

Four seconds. I have gone back over those four seconds more times than I am willing to admit. There isn't more detail to give you, because there wasn't more happening — there was light, and heat, and the specific, awful silence of a room that has just done something it can't take back.

When it cleared, the chair across from me held an empty suit — a very good one, Italian, collapsed in on itself the way a soufflé does the second it remembers gravity is a thing that applies to it — and on top of the suit, upright, indignant, and, I want to note, extremely well-groomed given the circumstances, sat a Pomeranian.

I did not scream. I want that on the record, mostly because everyone I have told this story to since has assumed I must have, and I understand why they assume it, but screaming requires a kind of surprise that I did not, underneath everything, actually feel. Some part of me had known a day like this was coming the way you know a storm is coming — not from any one thing, but from the specific stillness in the air beforehand, the stillness I had personally been enforcing for fifteen years.

The dog barked at me. Furious. Sharp. It had a cadence to it I recognized immediately, the way you'd recognize someone's voice through a wall before you could make out a single word.

What I did, in that moment, was reach for my tote bag, very calmly, the way my mother reaches for a dish towel when something has gone wrong and the only remaining task is making sure the neighbors never find out, and I thought, in her exact voice, the one she saves for property damage: okay. Now we have a situation.

Then I looked at the small, furious, extremely well-groomed dog barking at the door of my own office, and said the only thing that felt appropriate to the moment.

"I need you to get in the bag."

He did not get in the bag. I want that on the record too, because it turned out to be the first small, telling clue of exactly how little was going to change about him, going forward, no matter what species he happened to currently be standing in.

I sat down on the floor of my own office, in my good blazer, on carpet I had never once in three years considered sitting on, and looked at him for a long moment, and he looked back at me, and neither of us said anything, because there was, at that particular moment, nothing either of us currently had the equipment to say. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I still had a 3:30 PM call with the Whitfield analytics team, and that I was going to have to find a way to be in that call sounding entirely normal within the hour, and that this thought — logistics, arriving before grief, before fear, before anything else — was probably the single most accurate summary of my entire personality I could offer you, if you asked for one.

My manager was a dog. I had done that. And I was going to have to figure out how to undo it before anyone else in the building noticed that Julian Cross had gone missing at exactly the same moment his very unfamiliar, very well-groomed Pomeranian had appeared.