Daisy
I couldn’t focus.
I’d been staring at the same spreadsheet for forty minutes and hadn’t absorbed a single number. My eyes kept sliding off the screen, off the figures, off everything that should have mattered, and back to nothing. A blank middle distance somewhere between my monitor and the wall.
Sarah had come in twice. I’d waved her out both times without looking up.
The war room debrief had been brutal. Fifteen people around a table were looking at me for answers I didn’t have, faces carefully neutral in that way that meant they were all thinking the same thing and none of them had the nerve to say it. I’d held it together. I’d spoken clearly, assigned next steps, and outlined a counter-strategy with enough conviction that nobody questioned it.
The second the door closed behi
