Imani did.
She studied international business and Japanese at university, developing a particular interest in legal translation and corporate documentation.
She discovered that cross-border contracts were far more complicated than simply replacing one word with another.
Legal terms could carry different implications across jurisdictions.
A translation might preserve the general idea of a sentence while altering its practical consequences.
And the apparent simplicity of an English summary could conceal a very different obligation in a controlling-language agreement.
She found that fascinating.
After graduation, she worked for a bilingual documentation and compliance consultancy handling commercial agreements involving American and Japanese companies.
Her job was not to provide legal opinions.
She wasn't an attorney.
Her responsibility was to compare texts, identify discrepancies, prepare accurate translations, and alert qualified counsel when language appeared inconsistent with the parties' instructions.
She loved the work.
It required concentration.
Precision.
And the ability to notice differences other people overlooked.
For four years, she worked long hours reviewing supply agreements, licensing documents, financing schedules, and corporate records.
Her colleagues sometimes joked that she could spot a missing conditional phrase from across a conference room.
She smiled.
But she took the responsibility seriously.
A single mistranslated sentence could affect millions of dollars.
More importantly, it could cause people to sign obligations they hadn't intended to accept.
Then her life changed.
Her mother became seriously ill following a medical complication and required an extended period of treatment and rehabilitation.
The family's savings began disappearing into care expenses, insurance gaps, transportation costs, and ordinary household bills.
Imani's younger brother, Daniel, was sixteen and still in school.
Their father had died two years earlier, leaving Grace and the children without the support of the person who had always been the family's steady center.
Imani returned to New York to be closer to them.
She initially continued working in contract documentation.
But her schedule became increasingly difficult.
Care appointments.
Hospital visits.
Calls from insurance providers.
And emergencies that rarely respected office hours.
Then her firm assigned her to review a transaction with a serious discrepancy between Japanese and English versions.
She flagged the problem.
Her supervisor told her not to delay the client's signing.
She insisted that the discrepancy needed legal review.
The resulting dispute damaged her position at the firm.
Eventually, after a restructuring and a disagreement over how the review had been handled, her employment ended.
She received no dramatic settlement.
No newspaper interview.
No offer to join a prestigious law firm.
She simply found herself unemployed while her mother's expenses continued.
That was how she arrived at Kintsugi Sky.