SOFIA
I stopped pretending I wasn’t watching him. There wasn’t a point anymore; he already knew, and if he didn’t, he would. That was how everything worked here. So I shifted from avoiding it to using it.
He was in the same room again not by coincidence, as nothing here was. It was a different time of day with a different set of documents, but the same stillness remained. The same control. The same awareness. I took my seat without waiting to be told, sitting across from him at the same distance as before. There was enough space to breathe, but not enough to forget he was there.
He didn’t look up immediately. That was part of it too: the timing. When he acknowledged something, when he didn’t, what he let sit, and what he interrupted, I watched all of it. I noted the pauses before he res
