The pumpkin pie was from scratch.
I want to say this at the start because it is the kind of detail that matters to the full picture, the kind that shows you who someone is in a way that abstractions cannot. I had made it from a sugar pumpkin I roasted myself on Christmas Eve morning, not from a can, not because I was trying to impress anyone, but because that was how I had always made it, how my grandmother had made it, how I had learned to make it in the kitchen of the house where I grew up, the same house I was carrying it to on the afternoon this story begins.
I had made two pies.
One for the dinner and one for my own apartment, for the days after Christmas when I would be alone with leftovers and the specific quiet of someone who spends holidays with family and then returns to a life that is organized around her own rhythms.
I drove to my parents’ house in the suburbs of Denver on a clear, cold December afternoon with the pies in the back seat and the radio playing something I was not paying attention to because I was thinking about the quarter-end report I had to present in January and whether the projection model needed adjustment.
This is what my life was.
Numbers and projections and the specific disciplined attention of a financial analyst who had decided, early in her career, that the work was interesting enough to justify its demands.
My name is Claire Whitfield.
I am thirty-two years old, and at the time of this story I was twenty-nine, and I had been working at Meridian Capital in downtown Denver since I was twenty-four, which was when I graduated with my MBA from the University of Colorado and took the entry-level analyst position that my credentials and my interview had produced.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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