The press office wants a statement review.
My assistant wants confirmation on whether I am available for afternoon calls.
Compliance wants clarification on incident-report language.
Finance wants approval on the delayed marker review procedure changes.
Three department heads want to know if they should continue scheduled staff meetings or postpone until further notice.
And every single message seems to carry the same question underneath it.
Are you still in control?
My fingers hover over the keyboard.
I am.
I should be.
I have to be.
Instead, I can barely string three sentences together because every time there's a sound outside the door, I wonder if it is Adrian moving in the hallway.
Every time I look at the door, I remember standing outside his last night.
Every time I try to think about the casino floor, I see the blackjack table, the shove. I hear Adrian's voice calling my name, feel his hand wrap around my arm.
And every time I try not to think about Adrian’s mouth, I think about Adrian’s mouth anyway.
I close my eyes.
This is untenable.
Not the kiss. Not even the humiliation. All of it. The house. The lockdown. The waiting. The men making decisions. The women pretending they are not terrified. The children playing downstairs under armed watch. The world shrinking down to my father’s house when I need it to expand.
I cannot sit here and answer emails like this is a snow day.
I open a blank document.
Then I close it.
I open the incident timeline.
Then I close that too.
My gaze drifts to the notebook beside the laptop.
That, at least, feels like something I can touch.
Paper. Pen. Questions.
Not just sitting here and waiting for… something. Anything.
I pull it toward me and flip to a clean page.
At the top, I write:
“What do we actually know?”
