She had been asked a hard question in the meeting and she answered it thoroughly. Very thoroughly. She walked through the methodology, the sample size, the limitations section of the paper, the confounds she had considered, the robustness checks. She was accurate about every detail. She was also, she realized somewhere around the seven-minute mark, performing. The hard question had been asking whether the conclusion *mattered*, and she had responded by establishing that the work was competent. Nobody had doubted her competence. The careful exhaustive answer was a wall. She finished talking and felt the wrongness of it — correct on every bullet point and still not landing on the thing asked.
