I gave her work to do so I could focus.
That was the plan anyway.
She sat across from me sorting through the correspondence stack without a word and I had a border report in front of me that genuinely needed my attention and everything should have been straightforward. She works, I work, nobody looks at anybody, the morning passes without incident.
That was the plan.
The plan lasted about eleven minutes.
I do not even know when it started. One moment I was reading, actually reading, taking in the patrol notes from the eastern border and mentally flagging the parts that needed a response, and then at some point in between one line and the next my eyes moved up from the page and landed on her and just stayed there.
She had no idea.
That was the thing. She was completely absorbed in wh
