By Wednesday, she had matched his energy completely and the floor had become the most politely unbearable place she had ever worked.
She was professional. She was efficient. She was invisible in every way and did not compromise the quality of her work, which she maintained at its usual standard because her work ethic was not dependent on the emotional temperature of her environment and never had been. She handled the correspondence and the brief and the calls and the scheduling with the focused competence that had been her professional signature since her first week in the building.
She simply did not linger.
She did not bring him coffee. She did not knock on his door unless the work required it. She did not look up when she heard his key card at the elevator in the morning, and she did
