The growl that erupts from my midsection is not a polite, discreet rumble. It is a full-bodied, seismic, apocalyptic announcement of gastrointestinal distress that reverberates through the office chair, through the desk, and probably through the thin walls separating my office from the corridor where it will be heard by anyone within a fifteen-foot radius.
My face ignites.
The blush hits my cheeks with the speed and intensity of a chemical reaction—instant, total, the specific shade of mortified crimson that occurs when your body betrays you in front of a man whose opinion you are pretending not to care about.
“I, um.” I clear my throat. The professional composure that has survived department confrontations, academy assaults, and a blackout in my own doorway crumbles against the indignity of my stomach narrating its suffering to an audience. “I haven’t had lunch yet.”
“I know.” Alaric sets the coffee and the bag on the one clear corner of my desk that isn’t currently serving as an evidence display. “You’ve been cooped up in here for seven hours.”
I blink.
My eyes find the clock on the wall—the cheap, battery-operated institutional variety that every government building acquires from the same catalog of things designed to make time feel slower than it is.
Three seventeen p.m.
I’d walked in at eight.
Seven hours.
Seven hours without eating, drinking, or apparently using the restroom, which my bladder is now informing me was an error in judgment of the highest order.
“Shit.” The word is delivered with the flat candor of a woman confronting the evidence of her own self-neglect. “I didn’t even take a bathroom break.”
I look at the desk.
At the chaos I’ve generated over seven uninterrupted hours of analysis—papers overlapping like geological strata, photographs half-buried beneath reports, the laptop still paused on footage that hasn’t yielded answers, Post-it notes with my handwriting stuck to surfaces in a configuration that made perfect sense during assembly and now looks like the evidence board of a conspiracy theorist who has lost the thread.
I cringe.
“Oh my god. Uh…let me, um…”
My hands hover over the desk, caught between the urgency of organizing this disaster and the competing urgency of a bladder that has been patient for seven hours and is officially filing a formal complaint. I don’t know where to start. The papers need ordering. The photographs need re-pinning. Thelaptop needs saving before the battery dies and takes the footage timestamps with it.
The overwhelm arrives without warning—the sudden, disorienting flood of a brain that has been hyperfocused for too long and has just surfaced to discover that the world continued happening while it was submerged. The desk. The bathroom. The hunger. The seven lost hours. The fire investigation that’s going nowhere. The medical situation that’s getting worse. The temporary pack that may or may not be real. The station that someone tried to burn. The cases that someone doesn’t want solved.
Too much. Too many variables. Too many open loops demanding simultaneous attention from a processor that’s been running on three plates of eggs and no water for the better part of a day.
A hand settles on my shoulder.
Alaric’s palm, warm through the henley’s fabric, applying the precise amount of pressure required to interrupt a spiral without triggering the defensive response that follows uninvited contact. The weight is grounding—steady, present, communicating a message that doesn’t require words:stop. Breathe. One thing at a time.
“Go use the restroom first,” he says, his voice carrying the calm, measured authority of a man who has been managing overwhelmed officers for two decades and understands that the most effective intervention is often the most practical. “Then we’ll tackle this.”
We share a look.
Brief. Warm. Carrying more information than the words that preceded it—the acknowledgment that he’s here, that I’m not alone in this office anymore, that the seven-hour isolation my brain had defaulted to is no longer the only operational mode available.
I nod.
Slowly.
And go.
When I come back—three minutes, maybe four, enough time for the most necessary biological functions and a handful of cold water splashed on a face that the bathroom mirror informs me has been wearing the same focused scowl for seven consecutive hours?—
The office has been transformed.
My desk, which I’d left looking like the aftermath of a paper factory explosion, is clean. Not empty—the relevant documents are still present, the laptop still open. But organized. Every file categorized. Every photograph grouped by case. Every Post-it note relocated to the appropriate document with the adhesive precision of someone who read my disorganized sprawl, decoded its logic, and reassembled it into a system that improves upon the original while respecting its architecture.
