Chapter Five - Nora
Thursday broke something in her feet specifically.
Nine hours in the heels. Then an unplanned run up to the fourth floor and back when the printer jammed on the one deck Priya needed by five. Then another four hours in Conference B after that.
By ten the office was empty except for her, Elias, and the hum of the one overhead light that never went dark with the rest of the floor.
She peeled the shoes off under the table the second she sat down. No ceremony this time. No pretending it was anything but necessity. Then, because the ache had gone deeper than the usual end-of-day complaint, she pulled one foot into her lap and pressed her thumb hard into the arch.
"You okay?" Elias asked, not looking up from the layout.
"Nine hours in heels and a sprint to the fourth floor. I'm suffering. For the brand."
"The brand appreciates the sacrifice."
"The brand can start appreciating it with a foot rub."
A joke. The kind you make to a coworker at ten at night when your guard's down and your feet hurt too much to audit the sentence first.
He didn't answer.
It was barely a moment. She felt it anyway. The wrong kind of pause — not the kind that meant he was thinking about layout. She looked up.
He was looking at the foot in her lap. Not staring. Nothing dramatic. Just a level, steady attention that didn't match the joke she'd made.
Then it was gone, fast enough that she almost talked herself out of having seen it.
"I don't do house calls." Dry, back on his screen. "Talk to HR."
She laughed. Let it go. Kept working her thumb into the arch and scrolling the deck one-handed. But the stillness in him right before the joke landed stuck to her, like he'd needed that extra few seconds to find his way back to easy.
She filed it under *tired, imagining things*, and moved on.
Except she didn't stop noticing him after that.
Small things. His eyes going to the floor when she shifted in her chair, then coming back up on purpose.
The careful distance he kept even when the table would have let him lean in to see her screen.
A man who was either completely indifferent to her or working very hard to look it.
She couldn't tell which. That was the part that got under her nail — not either answer, just the not-knowing.
"What," he said at one point, catching her watching him watch her. A hall of mirrors neither of them wanted to name.
"Nothing. You're doing the thing again."
"What thing?"
"The going-somewhere-else thing. In your head."
"Thinking about the client deck."
She was fairly sure that wasn't entirely true. "Sure you are."
"I am." A pause. "Mostly."
*Mostly.*
Five letters. It sat there.
She waited for him to take it back, soften it into a joke. He didn't. He held her eyes one second past comfortable, calm, in no hurry about any of it, and went back to the layout like nothing had happened.
Nora sat with her bare foot still in her own hand, thumb gone still against the arch.
Something went half a degree off its axis. Small. Almost nothing. The kind of thing you'd miss if you weren't paying close attention.
She was paying close attention.
She put her shoes back on before she left that night, first time in a week. Told herself it had nothing to do with him. Didn't manage to believe it all the way to the train.