Chapter 12 Chapter Twelve

• The morning light came in hard and colorless across the glass wall of Alex’s office.
• He had been there since before six, the city still mostly dark when he arrived. The integration reports from the logistics acquisition sat open on the desk, already reviewed twice. He made one minor adjustment to a staffing timeline and sent the file back with a single-line note. The work should have settled him. It did not.
• The storage room kept returning in exact pieces. The first urgent joining against the door. The slower second time when she had watched him without looking away. The calm way she had refused the ride afterward and returned to her checklist as if the hour had been a temporary interruption rather than a shift in the ground beneath them.