Chapter 20 Cook

• The darkness that followed one man's pleas and the weight of another man's question had become forever entangled in her mind, taking the night from her. She'd lost the late hours of the night to the ceiling, confused between a past she was forced to leave, and a future to which she wasn't ready to open her eyes to.
• Sleep hadn't come. Maddison moved quietly in the dark during the early morning hours in her apartment and she felt like a ghost, the exhaustion a heavy cloak on her shoulders. The cold water she splashed on her face that morning did nothing to erase the image of Tyler's panicked messages or the soft, five-word question that Grant had sent to her email. The unanswered invitation was an electronic bomb in her inbox, a soft, ticking watch demanding action she felt entirely unready to perform.
• A few hours later, she found herself on her way to work. Going to Harrison Enterprises was difficult but a duty she had to perform. The city‘s morning madness; honking horns, brushing faces, aroma of street cart coffee and car exhaust akin to a assault on her senses, a temporary barrier to herself and the problems that her mind endured. But the noise returned, the dreadful burden of choices, as she entered the smart elevator. By the time doors opened on the forty-eighth floor, the tidy prettiness of her world seemed strange. Her desk was about to span a wide area of an entire city, all across which she was re-working, and it was less of a sign of her success than a pretty cage.