Page 33 of Wells

He pushes off my desk and walks toward his office without another word. The air shifts again, lighter now that he is gone, and I can finally breathe without my body staging a revolt.

The damp heat between my legs is all that is left of whatever my body was doing when he walked up. The timing could not have been worse, and now I have to go clean myself up.

I lean over the screen and scroll through the third iteration of the supply chain visibility map. It's way too dense. There's too much data crammed into a single web page, which defeats the purpose of proving Stone Intermodal can make complexity simple.

"This won't work."

Wells glances up from the notes he is reading. His lips purse into a flat line.

"Why?"

"Because you're asking them to trust all of this data you're throwing at them without giving context. They will get lost in the detail and assume you are hiding something."

We've been at this for two hours now. When he said he'd not done much, he literally hasn't done anything. He ran reports, that's all.

I've spent the better part of this time trying to create a plan for how to disseminate, and then he brings me twenty-five ticker feeds.

His eyes narrow.

"How would you suggest we do it, then?"

I grab the stylus and circle three clusters of tracking data on the screen.

"You need one anchor metric that tells the whole story. Use that as the single example. Then you layer in the supporting proof, only snippets. If you lead with all of it, I think it makes none of it matter."

Wells sets the notes down and stands. He moves around the desk and stops beside my chair, close enough that the air shifts. Something kicks behind my ribs, but I keep my eyes on the screen.

He leans forward and taps the anchor cluster I circled. Cigarette smoke clings to him, the kind of thing that would normally turn me off, and on him it pulls at me for reasons I do not stop to examine.

"Origin to delivery lag."

"Yes."

"That is the metric that matters."

"Exactly. Everything else supports it. I am not saying your data is weak. I am saying pick your white whale and let it tell the story of all the others."

He stares at the screen for three breaths. I can see him running the argument in his head. It amazes me how differently our brains work and how they still lock together into one machine that runs.

"Restructure it. Lead with lag and push the granular data to backup links if they want to see more."

I exhale and pull the slide into editing mode. My hands are steadier than the rest of me.

"Smart choice."

"It was your idea."

"I know. But you agreed. That was smart."

His mouth twitches.

I rebuild the page with lag as the hero metric, pulling the origin points and delivery windows into a clean visual hierarchy that tells the story in five seconds rather than five minutes.

Wells reads over my shoulder. His attention is absolute. He does not fidget or check his phone or drift. He watches the work with the same intensity most men save for the things they actually want.

I save the changes and lean back. My shoulder brushes his arm. Heat flares where we touch, and I pull away fast, professional, pretending I did not notice.

"Next section?"