She reached for her laptop, but her movements weren't the frantic, purposeful clicks of a woman lost in an edit. She opened it with a slow, heavy deliberation, the gesture of someone who needed a shield, a way to anchor her gaze to something tangible while she processed the sheer, unadorned gravity of what he had just laid at her feet.
The screen's glow cast a pale, clinical light over her face, highlighting the sharp intellect and the exhaustion that lived in the lines of her eyes.
"I need to think about this," she said.
It wasn't a request; it was a boundary. A perimeter established to prevent the conversation from spiraling into something neither of them was ready to navigate just yet.
"That's fair," Mike replied.
He didn't push. He didn't lean in to fill the space she had just carved out for herself.
He sat in the tension, letting it exist.
