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am I. Did you call me for a reason?”
    “I went to the town hall meeting last night.”
    “You hate politics. You also hate meetings, crowds, and potentially contentious situations. This is why you’re my research guru, and I do the meetings.”
    “The library budget was on the agenda.”
    “Don’t tell me they cut it. Please do not slash the last remaining hope I have for the future of our country before I have another pot of coffee.”
    “Actually,” Alana said, “they asked me to come up with a proposal for updating the library. I mean, I know how much the library means to the community, but they asked me to do the proposal.”
    “And why wouldn’t they? You are the research librarian for the Wentworth Foundation.”
    “It’s not research. It’s a proposal and a presentation.”
    “To all eighteen residents of Walkers Ford, South Dakota?”
    Alana rolled her eyes. “Nineteen. Lisa Sturdyvent had her baby last week. Michael Christopher. Seven pounds, eleven ounces. Mother and baby both healthy.”
    “Well, then. A buzzing metropolis.”
    “Don’t make fun of this, Freddie. This matters here. I don’t want to mess it up.”
    “I’m sorry, Lannie,” she said, her voice gentling. “What do you need?”
    “I can do the research. It’s the proposal I’ve never done.”
    “It’s simple. Do the research. That part you know. Then go through the research, identify the best solution, then anticipate objections, and counter those in the proposal. A good position paper is as much persuasive as it is factual. Surely you’ve read the position papers we craft after you obtain thousands of pages of data for us.”
    “Of course,” Alana said, stung. “I’ve just never written one.”
    “I’ll send you some of the shorter ones from the foundation’s infancy, when we weren’t getting invited to sit at the big-boy table. Oh, this is brilliant!” Freddie had picked up Toby’s slang, but stopped short of imitating his accent. “This will be good training for you. Then when you get back you won’t have any reason to object to taking on a larger role in the foundation.”
    She didn’t want a larger role in the foundation. She liked the role she had. For the most part. She liked getting staffers what they needed, spending hours trawling through databases and archives, considering a problem from as many different angles as she could. She didn’t like moving on to the next problem, then the next one, constantly skimming the surface. But when she sat at her family’s table at a conference, or heard stories from people helped downstream by the changes the foundation affected, she really liked what she did.
    “It’s a situation with no real world impact,” Freddie went on, by this point talking as much to herself as she was to Alana. “It’s the perfect rehearsal.”
    “There’s actually quite a bit of real world impact,” Alana said.
    “Of course, but not your real world,” Freddie said smoothly.
    Santiago, New Delhi, or Budapest weren’t actually her real world, either, but Alana didn’t have enough tea in her to argue with a caffeinated Freddie. “It’s a key resource in the community and Chatham County. When a town this size makes a financial commitment like this one, the ramifications, the impact is enormous.”
    “I understand.” Alana heard her sister’s fingernails against keys. “You should have left two months ago. You can’t let local politics delay you.”
    The council couldn’t agree on a direction for the library, let alone make a personnel decision. But with the upcoming banquet and Freddie’s wedding, Alana had to leave in two weeks.
    “Build strategy on research,” Freddie continued. “Base the proposal and execution phases on that research. Keep it rational, fact-based, unemotional, fiscally beneficial. Lead with the blindingly obvious. By the time you’re proposing a solution, they’re so used to nodding their heads that they just keep nodding. I’m sending you