“The cantilever,” Miller repeats, tapping the table. “Ross. I’m waiting.”
I turn back to the table. I sit down. I open the schematics. The lines of the Silver Thorn Tower swim before my eyes, load paths, shear forces, tensile strength. It’s a language I’ve spent a decade mastering, and suddenly, it looks like gibberish.
“The offset works because it breaks the wind load,” I say, annoyed. “It reduces the vortex shedding at the peak.”
“Good,” Miller says. “But we need to prove the dampening. Tabitha, pull the results from the wind tunnel test.”
The meeting grinds on.
Ten minutes pass. Twenty.
My phone lights up again on the credenza. Silent this time. Just a soft, white glow in the periphery of my vision.
I can’t see the name from here. Is it her again? Is she leaving a voicemail? Is she telling me she filed for divorce? Is she telling me she’s leaving town?
Ten feet away, I might as well be on the moon. In an agonizing pinch, my heart is choking me.
“Ross, pay attention,” Arthur barks. “You’re drifting.”
“I’m here,” I lie.
I’m not. I’m staring at that piece of glass and metal across the room. I am watching my life dissolve in silent, glowing pulses while I argue about wind velocity.
This isn’t a job. Margot’s right, it’s a cage. And I just locked myself inside.
The screen goes dark again.
“Okay,” Miller says, leaning back. “Let’s run the numbers.”
Tabitha types furiously, completely absorbed. She is thriving in this tank. She breathes this water.
But my hands are shaking.
I need to get out of this room. But I don’t. I sit there, a good soldier, a future partner, while the silence on the other side of the room grows louder than the shouting in my head.
Chapter 8
Ross
For the next forty-eight hours, I’m a ghost in my own life. Pacing the hallways, I stare at a phone that refuses to ring and draft a dozen emails I never send, mostly because I’m afraid she’ll block me. Luckily, I do find out that she’s at Wren’s house, thanks to her parents finally putting me out of my misery after a stern if you bother her, we’ll kick your ass speech.
So I bide my time, waiting for the perfect moment, when I have something tangible to show her. She’s heard my spiel.
When I finally drive to the office, it’s not out of desire, but necessity. The silence at home has become a physical weight I can no longer bear. I walk into the building like a dead man clocking in, hoping the firm’s chaos will numb the sensation of the ground crumbling beneath my feet.
The fluorescent lights scream, a low-frequency hum drilling directly into the soft tissue behind my eyes. The brightness is aggressive, bouncing off the polished marble floors and stabbing at the ache in my head.
Stopping in the breakroom doorway, my skin feels too tight, buckling under internal pressure. I haven’t shaved. My jaw is shadowed by two days of failure. My tie, the silk one Margot bought me for our fifth anniversary because it matched the Mediterranean, hangs limp against a shirt that’s a roadmap of wrinkles.
I’m a walking violation of the firm’s aesthetic standards, a condemned building waiting for the wrecking ball.
But for once in my life, I don’t care.
Even though it’s only 7 a.m., Chan, my only real friend here, is already in the breakroom.
He sits at the small, granite-topped table, back perfectly straight, stirring his coffee with a wooden stick. He doesn’t glance up when I enter, but he senses me nonetheless, must be my usual straight posture turned slouch.
I move toward the coffee station on legs that feel like unreinforced concrete. The air is stale, recycled one too many times through the building’s filtration system. It feels thin in my lungs.
