Description

It wasn’t the meetings that did it.Those she could survive.Rooms, eyes, pauses—she knew how to stand inside them without shrinking.It wasn’t the pressure either.Pressure had weight, yes, but it was predictable. It followed rules. It announced itself with delays and denials and polite resistance.What nearly broke her was the quiet that followed.The night came down slowly, the city outside her window glowing with the indifference of a thousand lives continuing just fine without her permission. She stood there longer than necessary, still in the clothes she’d worn all day, heels discarded somewhere behind her like evidence of endurance rather than