IDA KATZ-LIEBOWITZ

The force of nature. The bridge. The one who already knew.

There are people who enter your life quietly, wait to be invited in, and gradually become important. Ida Katz-Liebowitz has never understood the point of any of those steps.

She arrives.

Ida has spent a lifetime arranging things—people, problems, opportunities, occasionally entire futures—with the absolute confidence of someone who assumes that if everybody would simply stop talking for a minute, she could straighten this out. She is direct, relentless, fiercely loyal, and usually several moves ahead of the people who have only just discovered there is a game.

The black straw hat helps. It has become less an accessory than an early-warning system.

Ida's gift is people. She sees connections before anyone else does and has an almost unnerving instinct for knowing who needs whom. She does not merely introduce people; she rearranges the furniture of their lives and then acts mildly surprised when everything fits better afterward. Resistance is acknowledged but rarely considered relevant.

Underneath all that force is the reason people let her get away with it. Ida cares. Deeply. She has little patience for ceremony and even less for self-pity, but when somebody needs help, she is already moving before everyone else has finished discussing what should be done.

She can be infuriating. She can be exhausting. She can make a perfectly capable adult wonder how they somehow ended up doing exactly what Ida wanted while believing it was their own idea.

It probably wasn't.

Ida doesn't take over. She simply waits for everyone else to realize she's already in charge.