The corridor at Ashford Technologies had the particular energy of a building mid-morning—purposeful, self-contained, the specific hum of an operation that continued regardless of what was happening in the corner office at the end of it. Aurora walked it with her posture arranged and her expression set, the automatic adjustments of someone who had been composing herself in professional corridors for long enough that the composure arrived before she consciously reached for it.
She let out a quiet breath through her nose. One she had been holding since the elevator.
Another joint session. Another room with the pressurized atmosphere that had accumulated between them over the past weeks—the silences that had weight, the sentences that meant something other than what they said, the exhaustion of two people managing the distance between them with the full force of their available professionalism and finding it increasingly insufficient.
She stopped at the door.
