The silence in my office had become unbearable. Not silence in the literal sense — the city still roared beneath the glass, car horns stitched with sirens and pedestrian chatter. Inside the office, keyboards clicked, printers spat out proposals, the ventilation hummed. Life moved. Work moved. But the silence behind it — the quiet absence of questions, the void where decisions used to bottleneck at my desk — that was deafening.
Every task I used to oversee now seemed to happen before I even touched it. Budgets balanced. Contracts reviewed. Approvals slid across the desk with my signature line left blank, waiting for me to pretend I still held the reins. The illusion of power — all form, no function.
“Mr. Wolfe’s office already confirmed this version,” my assistant, Rachel, said as she pla
