*Bael's POV*
The quarterly performance report sat open on Bael's desk.
He had been staring at the same page for nearly five minutes. He's neither reading nor processing it. He's just looking at it while his mind wandered somewhere else entirely.
The realization irritated him enough that he closed the report and pushed it aside.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city stretched beneath a gray afternoon sky. Traffic crawled through the financial district. Construction cranes dotted the horizon.
Normally, work made everything simpler.
Work had structure, predictability, problems that could be solved through logic and effort.
Lately, however, even work wasn't functioning properly.
His attention kept drifting.
Back home, back to Runze, back to a study where two people sat on opposite sides of a room pretending everything was normal.
Bael leaned back in his chair.
Three days.
