Michael's office stayed quiet the way it always did, the kind of quiet that wasn't empty but controlled. The glass walls reflected the city outside without letting any of it in, and the only sound in the room was the low hum of the air system and the soft movement of paper as he turned a page.
He wasn't rushing anything. He never did.
A report sat open in front of him, but he wasn't reading it line by line. His eyes moved across it slowly, picking what mattered, ignoring what didn't. Numbers, projections, engagement patterns, regional growth. It was all there, arranged neatly, but his focus wasn't fully on it. Not today.
There had been a shift over the past few days. He could feel it even without anyone saying it directly. The noise around Dayo in Nigeria had started to behave differently. Still loud, still active, but not expanding the way it had been before.
That kind of change never happened on its own.
