“Okay,” she says. “Shape first.”
I gesture toward the whiteboard — an invitation, not a pull.
She nods once and walks beside me, close enough that our shoulders almost touch but not quite.
We move to the whiteboard.
She writes dates and short phrases in her quick, cramped handwriting. I fill in details only I can hold.
“The day the gladiators-as-trauma-experts idea clicked?” she asks.
“June fifteenth,” I say without thinking. “You skipped lunch. You spilled mustard on your notebook. You said, ‘We’ve been asking the wrong questions.’”
Her mouth twitches. “I did, didn’t I?”
She writes something on the board.
“The first time I sketched the framework?” she asks. “The three-column version.”
“June seventeenth. Late. You were wearing green shirt with lines on it. You drew boxes until the marker dried out.”
She writes again.
“The computer meeting with Blackwell where you first mentioned it,” I say. “You went in excited. You came back… not.”
Her shoulders dip at the memory. “June twentieth,” she says. “She said it had potential but needed refining. I believed her. I kept feeding her updates.”
She marks it on the board.
“I’m not ready to write this up as a complaint yet. This is just the bones.”
But bones make a spine. A structure. A thing that stands.
When we finally step back, the board holds something clear and undeniable: the life of her idea before Blackwell ever touched it.
Sophia exhales a long, shaking breath.
“It helps,” she murmurs. “Seeing it. Knowing I didn’t invent this in my head.”
“You see patterns other people miss,” I say. “That is why you saw us as more than entertainment. That is not a flaw. That is the gift that woman tried to steal.”
A faint, fragile smile appears and then fades.
Then her shoulders slump.
“I’m exhausted,” she admits.
“You ate?” I ask.
She thinks. “Coffee.”
“Coffee is not food,” I say. “Come. Kitchen. Small one by staff offices. Quiet. We eat.”
She hesitates for a second, then nods.
We leave the conference room and slip into the little staff kitchen. Lights low, only the hum of the fridge and the faint clatter from the big dining hall far away.
I find thin slices of meat in a package in the fridge, bread on the counter, carrots and an apple in a basket. My hands move easily as I provide for her. The simple work calms something in me.
