4. Tyler #2
I wait until 2:15. The afternoon light cuts across my desk in sharp geometric slabs, and I've read the same paragraph of the Singapore brief four times without absorbing a single word.
Through the glass wall, she's been on calls all morning.
Her team, mostly. I can tell by the way her posture loosens, the way she leans back and gestures with both hands while she talks, headphones on, mouth moving fast. Once, she laughed.
A real one. Head tipped back, throat exposed.
The sound didn't carry through the glass, but it moves through her body like a current, and something behind my sternum cracked open.
I grasp my desk phone. Push the extension for her office.
One ring.
"Barnes."
"My office. When you have a moment."
A pause. Two seconds. Three.
"Give me ten minutes."
She hangs up first.
I lay the phone down and realize my pulse is doing something it hasn't done before a meeting in over a decade. Not the boardroom kind of pulse, the kind where adrenaline sharpens everything into focus. This is different. Looser. Lower. A heat that starts at the base of my spine and spreads upward.
I stand. Unbutton my jacket. Button it again. Look out the window, then back to the desk. I haven't paced in my own office since the day we went public thirteen years ago.
I sit down. Pull up a file on my monitor so the screen isn't blank when she walks in. Risk assessment on the Kepler deal. Numbers and charts. Something to look at that isn't the door.
Seven minutes pass.
The knock comes at 2:24. Two sharp raps. Professional.
"Come in."
She enters carrying a tablet and a legal pad.
Her blazer is emerald green over a black turtleneck, and she's swapped the pencils in her bun for a single tortoiseshell clip.
The braids from last week are gone. Today it's the silk press, bone-straight and gleaming under the overhead lights, tucked into that low twist. Her lipstick is a matte burgundy that makes her mouth look like a warning sign.
She sits in the chair across from my desk. Crosses her legs. Opens her legal pad to a blank page. Pen poised.
Waiting.
I lean back. Study her face. Look for any crack, any trace of what happened in this room fourteen hours ago.
The way she gripped the armrests of this same chair.
The sound she made when she finally let herself go.
The way she stood up afterward and straightened her skirt like she was clocking out of a shift.
Nothing. Her face is a closed door with the deadbolt thrown.
"I restored the NLP budget," I say.
"I saw the email. Thank you." She writes something on her pad. Doesn't look up. "I've already re-scoped the sprint. My team can absorb the accelerated timeline if we maintain current headcount through Q3."
"Good."
Silence. She keeps her pen on the paper, hand steady.
"The board wants a live demo before the launch decision. Harold Voss specifically."
"When?"
"Eight weeks."
"Fine. I'll need access to the full production dataset, not the sandboxed sample your integration team gave us. The real data. Otherwise the demo will underwhelm, and Voss will use it as ammunition."
"I'll have it to you by end of week."
She writes that down too. Neat, tight handwriting. Every stroke deliberate.
The room is too quiet. The building hums sixty stories below us, all that infrastructure and wiring and human effort, and up here in this glass box it's just her pen on paper and the clock on my wall and the distance between her chair and mine, which is exactly the same distance it was last night when she closed it to zero.
"Shayla."
Her pen stops. She looks up. And her eyes are so flat, so aggressively neutral, that it takes physical effort not to flinch.
"Is there anything else regarding the integration?"
Regarding the integration.
"Last night," I start.
"Was a mistake." She doesn't blink. "A lapse in judgment during a high-stress confrontation. It won't happen again, and I'd prefer we don't reference it in a professional setting."
Each syllable is precise. Measured.
I search her face for the woman who pinned my wrists to the armrest and told me to keep my hands where she put them. She's not here. The person sitting across from me is Shayla Barnes, CEO of a recently acquired subsidiary, dutifully attending a meeting with her managing partner.
"Understood," I hear myself say.
"Great." She stands. Tucks the legal pad under her arm. Caps her pen. "I'll send the revised sprint timeline to your inbox by four. If Voss wants a pre-demo check-in, loop me in directly rather than going through Hoffman. He adds a week to everything."
She walks to the door. Opens it. Pauses with one hand on the frame, and for half a second, her shoulders shift, something tightening across her back.
Then she's gone. The door clicks shut with the soft, definitive sound of a lock engaging.
I sit in my chair. The same chair. The leather still holds the shape of what happened here last night, and I can still smell her perfume, warm amber and black currant, fading in the recycled air.
My hands are shaking.
I flatten them on the desk and peer at my knuckles until they stop.