The firm noticed before they said a word.
Not because Ronda and Karl suddenly became careless.
They didn’t.
No stolen touches in hallways.
No long conversations in front of open doors.
No soft smiles left lying around for other people to step on and name.
If anything, they became even more disciplined after that talk in the library.
That was what made the change easier to miss and harder to explain.
Nothing visible had happened.
And yet something had settled between them.
A direction.
A seriousness no longer running only on crisis.
A quiet knowledge that this was no longer just about surviving pressure or naming feeling.
It was becoming future.
And places like the firm had a strange instinct for sensing when people inside them stopped behaving like they were fully owned by th
