“No, no, this is the first. Alfred scheduled the other meeting after I told him I wasn’t available.” Lou felt drips of perspiration rolling down his back. His shirt clung to him, his tie choked his neck, and his hair felt matted to his head. He hoped neither of them could smell, like black coffee, the stench emanating from his underarms.

Alfred turned to Lou in surprise. It wasn’t like Lou to throw something like that at Alfred in front of Mr. Patterson. But the accusation was like blood to a shark, and Alfred was done with circling and was ready to bite. The corner of his lip turned up in a snarl as he said, “I know, Lou, and I apologize for that, but it was a development deal worth one hundred million euros. I couldn’t hold back on that just because you needed to take the morning off.”

Mr. Patterson looked to Lou.

“I didn’t take the morning off.” Lou leaned in, his voice breaking as it rose in pitch. He realized he sounded like a teenager standing up to his parents, but he couldn’t help it. He wiped the sweat from his lip with the back of his hand. “It was an hour. Just to collect my mother from the hospital. Then I was straight back in. You could have waited. That was the first hour I’ve taken off in five years working here.”

“Wow.” Alfred smiled. “Then you really know how to choose your hours. You could have picked a lunch break or something. Anyway, I closed the deal, Lou,” Alfred said, taking that first bite into Lou’s flesh. “I did it alone. So there’s no need to worry.”

Lou, trembling with rage, looked from one man to the other. He wanted to punch Alfred. Alfred wanted him to punch him. Lou looked to the water jug filled at the center of the table and thought about flinging it at Alfred’s head. Alfred’s eyes followed Lou’s gaze. He smiled knowingly.

“Do you need a glass of water, Lou?” Alfred asked. “You don’t look well.”

Mr. Patterson finally spoke up, “Is something the matter, Lou? You do look—”

“No,” Lou interrupted Mr. Patterson, cutting him off far more rudely than intended. “I’m fine. All is fine. In fact, I’m feeling better than usual.” He tried to perk himself up but felt a bead of sweat drip down his forehead. He quickly brushed it away. “I’m ready to go, ready for two important meetings this evening, both of which will be an absolute success.”

Mr. Patterson frowned. “Lou.” He was silent for a moment. “Are you sure you’ll be able to—”

“Absolutely,” he interrupted again. “I have never let you down before, Mr. Patterson, and I don’t intend on doing it now.” Not when so much was at stake.

Mr. Patterson looked at him with concern, then grumbled something inaudible, gathered his papers, and stood up. Meeting adjourned.

Lou felt like he was in the middle of a nightmare; everything was falling apart, all his good work was being sabotaged. He stormed out of the meeting room, ignoring Alfred’s faux-concerned voice calling to have a private word with him. Lou headed straight to Alison’s desk, where he threw the details of that evening’s dinner on her keyboard, stopping her acrylic nails midtap. She narrowed her eyes and scanned the brief.

“What’s this?”

“A dinner tonight. A very important one. At eight p.m. That I have to be at.” He paced the area in front of her while she read it more carefully.

“But you can’t; you have the conference call. It took us weeks to set that up. If you don’t talk to them tonight, they’ll go with Raven and Byrne, and you don’t want that.”

“I know, Alison,” he snapped. “But I need to be at this.” He stabbed a finger on the page. “Make it happen.” Then he rushed into his office and slammed the door. He froze before he got to his desk. On it his mail was laid out neatly.

He backtracked and opened his office door again.

Alison snapped to it quickly and looked up at him. “Yes?” she said eagerly.

“The mail.”

“Yes?”

“When did it get here?”

“First thing this morning. Gabe delivered it the same time as always.”

“He couldn’t have,” Lou objected. “Did you see him?”

“Yes,” she said, looking concerned. “He brought me a coffee, too. Just before nine, I think. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he snapped.

“Em, Lou, just one thing before you go…Is this a bad time to go over some details for your dad’s party?”

She’d barely finished her sentence before he’d gone back into his office and slammed the door behind him once again.

THERE ARE MANY TYPES OF wake-up calls in the world. For Lou Suffern, a wake-up call was a duty for his devoted alarm clock to perform on a daily basis. At six a.m. every day, when he was in bed sleeping and dreaming, thinking of yesterday and planning tomorrow, his alarm would ring dutifully and loudly. It would reach out from the bedside table and prod him right in the subconscious, taking him away from his slumber and dragging him into the world of the awakened. Lou would wake up; eyes closed, then open. Body in bed, then out of bed; naked, then clothed. This, for Lou, was what waking up was about. It was the transition period from sleep to work.

For other people wake-up calls took a different form. For Alison, it was the pregnancy scare at sixteen that had forced her to make some choices; for Mr. Patterson, it was the birth of his first child that had made him see the world in a different light. For Alfred, it was his father’s loss of their millions when Alfred was a child, forcing him to attend public school for a year before his father made it all back. It changed him forever. For Ruth, her wake-up call happened on their last summer holiday, when she walked in on her husband with their twenty-six-year-old Polish nanny. For little five-year-old Lucy, it was when she looked out into the audience during her school play to see an empty seat beside her mother.

Today, though, Lou was experiencing a very different kind of wake-up call. Lou Suffern, you see, wasn’t aware that a person could be awakened when his eyes were already open. He didn’t realize that a person could be awakened when he was already out of his bed, dressed in a smart suit, doing deals and overseeing meetings. He didn’t realize a person could be awakened when he considered himself to be calm, composed, and collected, able to deal with life and all it had to throw at him. The alarm bells were ringing now, louder and louder in his ear, and only his subconscious could hear them. He was trying to turn the bells off, to hit the snooze button so that he could nestle back down in the lifestyle he felt cozy with, but it wasn’t working. He didn’t know that he couldn’t tell life when he was ready to learn, that life would instead teach him when it felt he was good and ready. He didn’t know that he couldn’t press buttons and suddenly know it all; that it was the buttons in him that would be pressed.

Lou Suffern thought he already knew it all.

But he had only scratched the surface.