Turn 7 of 12

Tell Nadine you're done for tonight and head upstairs

'I'm done for tonight,' you say, and your voice is steadier than you feel. You clip the words off clean, no tail, no room for her to shape them into an invitation. 'Thanks for the tour.' You don't say 'sweetie' back. You don't say 'I'll think about it.' You turn toward the stairwell door and your legs carry you past her, past the cabinet, past the spot on the carpet where the sticky note was, and each step feels like something you're choosing rather than something the room is arranging.

Nadine doesn't stop you. That's the thing that sticks. She doesn't step sideways, doesn't reach, doesn't call after you with that warm voice softened into something coaxing. She just watches. You can feel it on the back of your neck, her gaze, the same way you'd feel a desk lamp someone left aimed at your chair. At the stairwell door you pull it open and the hinges are silent and the stairs rise up in fluorescent-lit concrete, and you climb.

The lobby is empty. The security desk is unmanned, the overhead lights dimmed to that after-hours amber that makes everything look like a photograph of itself. Your reflection in the glass doors is pale and sharp-edged and holding a badge that says RECORDS in blocky blue letters. You catch yourself checking your own expression for softness — not emotional softness, something else, something closer to the way a word looks after you've stared at it too long. Manageable. You mouth it without meaning to and the glass doesn't answer.

Outside, the air is cold and real and smells like October. You walk to the bus stop and sit on the bench and the metal is cold through your slacks and the city moves around you with the ordinary, unmanaged chaos of traffic and wind and a woman arguing with her phone. You hold your lanyard in both hands, badge between your fingers, and you think about Chad's tab and the blank page you wrote on and the way Nadine's glance touched the drawer for that half-second before the smile caught up. She wanted you to open it. She wanted you to start with someone else's folder, not yours. And you almost did. That's the part that sits with you on the bench, heavier than the cold — not that she tried, but that the trying felt so reasonable.

The bus comes. You get on. You don't look at the building again, but you feel it behind you the way you'd feel a door you left open. Tomorrow is Saturday. Monday is stand-up. Chad will be there, abrasive and credit-taking and exactly himself, and you'll have a whole weekend to think about what kind of marker you're holding and what it writes on.