CHAPTER 4
1147 Words
Dominic Voss
Monday should feel ordinary.
At least the shape of it is familiar. The same line of responsibilities waiting whether I’m ready for them or not. Calls, meetings, documents that need signatures, other documents that need more attention than I’d like to give them.
I arrive a few minutes before nine.
The elevator doors open to the quiet order of the office floor, and everything already looks the way it should. Papers neatly aligned. Lights on. My calendar arranged so the day appears manageable, even when it isn’t.
Mara is already at her desk.
Of course she is.
She stands as I walk past, coffee already in her hand, offering it to me with the easy timing of someone who has done this so often it barely requires thought anymore.
“Good morning, Miss Vega.”
“Good morning, Mr. Voss.”
The exchange slips into the rhythm of the morning without slowing anything down. I take the cup while still glancing at my phone, reading an email that arrived ten minutes ago and has already made itself inconvenient.
Two sugars. No cream.
I don’t remember telling her that.
But I must have at some point.
By the time I reach my office door, she’s already moving back to her desk. I hear the soft scrape of her chair across the floor as I step inside.
The first call begins three minutes later.
The Morrison acquisition file sits in the center of my desk, thick enough to promise trouble. I open it while the phone rings, skim the first pages while the call connects, and make a note beside a contract clause that will almost certainly become an issue later.
The morning picks up speed after that.
One call turns into three.
Three turn into five.
Somewhere around ten thirty there’s a knock on the door.
I don’t look up immediately.
“Come in.”
The door opens quietly.
Mara crosses the room with the Morrison briefing packet in her hands and places it on the edge of my desk.
“I’ve marked the sections that need review before the afternoon meeting.”
Her voice is steady, low enough that it doesn’t compete with the distant noise of the city drifting through the windows behind me.
I glance at the folder.
Several pages are marked with colored tabs.
“Thank you.”
She nods once and turns toward the door.
There’s something interesting about the way she leaves a room.
Not physically. She’s standing right in front of me at the moment, after all.
But attention slides past her easily. She never lingers longer than necessary. Never interrupts unless it’s important.
If you weren’t paying attention, you might forget she was there at all.
The thought passes through my mind without much weight.
By noon the day has gathered momentum.
Two meetings take up most of the late morning. The conference room fills with voices, the scrape of chairs, the rustle of printed agendas. Morrison’s legal team calls in halfway through the second meeting, which adds another layer of conversation that needs sorting.
Mara appears twice during the discussion.
Once to place a fresh pot of coffee on the side table.
Once to hand me a document someone forgot to include in the briefing packet.
Both times she moves through the room quietly, her presence barely noticeable beyond the small shift in air when she passes behind my chair.
It isn’t until later, after the room empties and the quiet settles again, that my thoughts start drifting somewhere else.
Friday night surfaces unexpectedly.
A flash of stage lights.
Music vibrating through the floor of a crowded room.
The woman who stepped into the center of it.
I lean back in my chair and roll a pen between my fingers.
It was a performance.
Nothing more complicated than that.
People admire performances all the time. Theater. Music. Dance.
There’s nothing irrational about appreciating someone’s skill.
I repeat that logic to myself several times throughout the afternoon.
It sounds reasonable every time.
Still, the image returns.
The slow, teasing roll of her shoulders under the stage lights. The way the room seemed to tilt toward her, drawn in by a pull it didn’t even know existed.
Aesthetic appreciation, I remind myself.
That’s all it is.
My email inbox continues filling while I’m thinking about this, which is probably a sign that I should stop thinking about it.
I answer three messages quickly.
Sign two documents.
Start a fourth email and abandon it halfway through when there’s another knock on the door.
“Come in.”
The door opens.
Mara steps inside carrying a tablet and a slim folder.
The late afternoon light catches briefly on the glass wall behind her before she moves farther into the room.
“I wanted to confirm tomorrow’s schedule before you leave.”
She stops at the edge of the desk. Close enough that I notice the faint crease between her brows as she scrolls through the tablet.
“Your first call moved to two thirty. Morrison requested an earlier review of the revised numbers.”
I nod once.
“Fine.”
She lists two more appointments.
I listen, committing the details to memory while she speaks.
Her voice has an even, steady rhythm to it.
When she finishes, she lowers the tablet slightly.
“That’s everything.”
For a moment neither of us moves.
Then something small shifts.
A faint scent reaches me when she adjusts her grip on the tablet. Warm. Slightly sweet.
It’s gone almost immediately.
I look up.
“Miss Vega.”
She pauses, already turning away.
“Yes?”
The scent has already faded.
Whatever it was lingers only in the sense that I might have imagined it.
“Nothing,” I say after a moment. “That will be all.”
She nods once.
“Of course.”
Her fingers brush briefly against the edge of the desk as she turns, a small absent gesture, and then she walks toward the door with the same composed calm she brings to everything else.
The door closes behind her.
I sit there for a moment longer than necessary.
Something about that moment stays with me.
The scent.
The strange familiarity of it.
I push the thought aside and reach for the Morrison file again.
Work is waiting.
It always is.
By the time I leave the office that evening, the memory has mostly faded into the background of the day.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, the image of the woman on the stage returns one last time.
The lights.
The movement.
The quiet way the entire room seemed to rearrange itself around her.
I dismiss the thought almost immediately.
Whatever that moment was, it belongs to Friday night.
And Mara Vega, quiet and easy to overlook as ever, was already here Monday morning when I arrived.
- Writer
