I’d ridden home in his car service. He’d insisted. He called the driver before I’d finished pulling my tank top back on, and the car had been at the curb of the Myrror building by the time we made it down to the lobby. Sutton walked me out with one hand at my back and told me twice he’d text me later that day before he closed the car door.
The driver hadn’t said a word the whole ride. He kept his eyes on the road, took the route to Pixel Lofts without me telling him my address, and when I reached for my wallet at the curb,he said, “Mr. Randall takes care of it” in a tone that ended the conversation.
I rolled onto my side and pressed my face into my pillow.
I had nine hours of work in front of me. I had eleven hundred unread messages. I had an engineering follow-up on Outfit Builder I’d promised Sutton I’d close out by end of week. And I was now going to have to walk into a building I had a different set of memories about than I’d had twenty-four hours ago.
I made myself sit up.
I’d dressed for work the way I dressed every weekday—a blouse that didn’t need ironing, a pencil skirt, low heels—but the choices felt different this morning. I picked the blouse with the higher neckline. I left the silver chain at home. I pulled my hair back into the same low knot I’d worn on the morning of the meeting last Friday, because the version of me that had walked into that conference room last week had felt like the version of me I needed to be again.
By 8:05, I was at my desk.
By 8:30, I’d answered four emails, none of which I could remember the contents of after I hit send.
By 9:15, I’d given up pretending. I sat with my hands flat on either side of my keyboard and let the screen blur in front of me, and I let myself think about him—just for sixty seconds, like a small allowance I’d granted myself. Then I made myself look back at my screen and try again.
The pod was quieter than usual. Or it sounded quieter. I wasn’t sure which.
Sutton was somewhere in this building. I knew he was, because his calendar had been visible on the Myrror internal directory when I’d checked it at 7:45 that morning from my apartment, telling myself I was looking for completely innocent professional reasons.
He had a board meeting at ten. He had a one-on-one with the head of engineering at 11:30. He had lunch blocked out, recipient unspecified. He had three back-to-back partner calls in the afternoon.
He was not coming to my desk today. I could tell that from his calendar alone.
He was being careful.
I understood why he was being careful. I’d just spent forty minutes choosing a blouse with a higher neckline, after all.
I made it through the morning. I closed two tickets. I wrote a message to the head of engineering about the Outfit Builder estimate and rewrote it three times before sending. I went to a stand-up meeting at ten and contributed nothing. I came back to my desk at 10:15, sat down, and was halfway through opening my email when my phone buzzed on the desk.
A message. It was from Mira.
Stop by my office when you have a minute.
The same exact phrasing Sutton had used on Monday, which was either a coincidence or the standard managerial language of every senior leader at every tech company in America. It didn’t matter because the result was the same. I had been summoned.
I stood and crossed the floor to her office. The door was open. She was at her desk with her glasses on her face for once, two monitors going, her hands moving fast across her keyboard. She finished what she was typing before she looked up.
“Close the door.”
I closed the door and sat in the chair across from her desk without being asked. My notebook was in my lap. My hands were flat on the cover of it.
She pushed her glasses on top of her head and looked at me for a long second before she said anything. Then she said the last thing I’d expected her to say.
“How was the partner reception?”
“Fine,” I said.
“You did well, from what I heard.”
“Thank you.”
“You worked the room. The head of marketing said you held your own with three of our newer accounts. That was good to hear.”
“Thank you,” I said again. I sounded like a wind-up doll. I could feel my pulse in my hands.
Mira leaned back in her chair. She crossed her arms.
