The photo hit my phone at 4:37 a.m.
A signature. A date. A stamped receipt.
I stared until the screen dimmed and faced down the phone on the nightstand. No reply. Not yet.
By eight, the lobby smelled like rain and printer toner. I swiped in and kept my eyes on the floor tiles, as if a pattern might tell me how to walk through a day that had already decided to be terrible.
The elevator was full. Two designers stopped talking when I stepped in. Someone coughed into a fist and studied the ceiling. Our reflections looked like strangers.
At twelve, I crossed the open office and felt the way attention changes temperature. Not staring. Not kind. That hover people do when they pretend to ignore you. Slack pinged three times before I sat down.
Ops-team: moving the vendor call to 2pm. Cc'ing f
