Preparing to ask instead of asking

Past a certain point, preparing to ask is the thing you do instead of asking, and the more carefully something is prepared the more certain it is that it has been prepared for years.

You had the four days fully costed for two years, which day you would drop, which clients would move, what it does to the household number, and never once said it to the person who could grant it. The drafted versions were all built to survive a refusal. The eleven unprepared seconds between the kitchen and the stairs were better than any of them, because that one was just a sentence.