I'm staring at this damn painting again... it's 2am and the city looks like a circuit board from the 44th floor, all neon veins and zero pulse. My eyes are burning from the blue light of the monitor, three different spreadsheets open like open wounds, but I can't look at them anymore. I keep turning my chair toward that canvas on the far wall, the one with the sub-alpine meadow and the jagged peaks of the Cascades. It’s a gift from my old man when I made junior partner—a joke really—because he spent thirty years actually walking those trails while I spend eighteen hours a day in a hermetically sealed glass box breathing recycled air and billing clients for the privilege of making me miserable.