Miles's floor feels more like a change in altitude. Where Spencer's office ran on silence and the careful management of oxygen, the technology division operates on caffeine, argument, and a noise level that would qualify as a health violation in most civilised countries.
"Your desk." Miles drops a laptop bag on a surface buried under sticky notes and three branded coffee mugs. "Ignore the chaos—it's structural."
"Structural chaos—very reassuring." I peel a sticky note off the keyboard that reads KEVIN STOP TOUCHING MY MONITOR. "Should I be concerned about Kevin?"
"Kevin has boundary issues, but his code is immaculate." Miles grins—open, easy, the kind that makes the room feel wider. "You'll sit in on the product review at ten, then I need your notes on the beta interface by three."
I set my bag down and the air does something it never did on Spencer's floor—it settles. My shoulders drop two inches without my permission, and the hum behind my sternum quiets from a scream to something almost bearable.
I hate how obvious the difference is. Spencer's proximity sharpened everything—every nerve a live wire, every silence a loaded gun. Miles turns the volume down on every alarm I've been running, and my body responds like a stray animal encountering the first warm hand it doesn't flinch from.
The product review involves six developers and Miles running the conversation with the easy authority of someone who trusts his team enough to let them argue. He asks my opinion on the interface layout twenty minutes in—not as a test. He asks because he wants to know what I think.
"The navigation's buried." I point at the screen. "A first-time user would give up before finding the settings panel."
"That's what I said two sprints ago." A developer named Priya swivels her chair toward me. "Nobody listened."
"I listened—I just didn't act fast enough." Miles holds up both hands. "Bailee's right—we're rebuilding the nav hierarchy, Priya, you're leading it."
Priya points at me with her stylus—"I like her, she can stay"—and my mouth twitches before I can stop it. The first unsolicited approval I've received in this building that didn't come from a Wallace.
The morning dissolves into interesting work—untangling user flows, flagging inconsistencies, watching Miles translate arguments into decisions with a patience I didn't know management possessed. Being treated like a colleague instead of a charity case sits in my chest like something I can't swallow.
After lunch—which he orders without asking and sets on my desk like it's the most unremarkable act in recorded history—we're side by side reviewing competitor dashboards. The conversation drifts in increments so small I don't notice it happening.
"This one's trying too hard." I scroll past a competitor's interface. "It's like a dating profile designed by someone who thinks personality means font choices."
"Harsh but accurate." His shoulder is four inches from mine, warmth radiating off his skin into the gap between us. "You always had that—the ability to look at something and see exactly what it's pretending to be."
"I don't know what you mean." My fingers pause on the trackpad, and something behind my ribs tightens.
"Lake Oswego, the summer you were sixteen." He leans back, green-hazel eyes holding a memory I've spent eight years filing under do not access. "We played cards every night for a week, you destroyed me, and when I tried to lose the last game on purpose you caught it in three hands."
"You were obvious." My throat does something structural—a shifting of load-bearing walls. "You kept discarding aces like you thought I couldn't count."
"I thought I was being subtle." His mouth curves, and something in my chest compresses hard enough to register in my spine. "You told me—exact words—'If you let me win, I'll never play you again.' And then you beat me by forty points."
"Forty-three." The correction slips out before I can cage it, and the fact that I remember the exact margin is a confession I didn't authorise.
"Forty-three." He repeats it softly, and the air between us stretches taut and warm. His eyes hold mine and I let them—two seconds, three—existing inside the pull without fighting it for the first time since I walked into his department.
Then my stomach detonates. The nausea hits suddenly—no warning, no gradient, just the floor vanishing under my internal organs.
"Bathroom." The word comes out compressed, a full sentence crushed into a single syllable. "One minute."
I make it to the stall with half a second to spare and my knees hit tile as everything I've eaten today stages a violent evacuation. My forehead presses against the partition while my body empties itself with the enthusiasm of someone who did not agree to this arrangement.
Three minutes later—cold water on my wrists, mouth rinsed, foundation reapplied with shaking hands—the mirror gives me back a face two shades paler than it was an hour ago. I rearrange it into something that could pass for human under fluorescent lighting and walk back to my desk.
Miles is leaning against my partition, arms crossed, his expression reconfigured into something that's blown past casual concern and landed in territory I cannot afford. "I'm fine—skipped breakfast, rookie mistake."
"You skip every breakfast." His voice is quiet, the observation sitting between us, waiting for me to respond. I don’t. "That's not a one-time thing, Bailee—that's a pattern."
"It's a time-management strategy." I pull my chair back and open the competitor file. "Mornings are for coffee and poor decisions, not food."
"You're not drinking coffee either." His eyes track to the untouched mug on my desk—the one I poured at nine and haven't lifted once. "You used to hold it like a pin on a grenade, and now you won't go near it."
"Tastes different lately." My fingers find the keyboard and type nothing, staring at the screen. "New supplier—probably Celeste switching to the cheapest brand as a personal vendetta."
He watches me for three more seconds—long enough that my pulse takes up to my wrists—then nods once and walks back to his office. The silence he leaves behind is worse than Spencer's surveillance, because it's patient.
I get through the remaining hours by converting every sensation into productivity, treating the afternoon like a wall I'm building one brick at a time between myself and the thing I can't think about. Miles doesn't ask again, but his open door watches me in a way that feels suffocating and liberating at once.
That night, my bathroom mirror holds my reflection like evidence under subpoena. I pull my shirt up and stand there—hands braced on the sink, fluorescent light turning my skin clinical.
Same stomach, same skin, same body that has carried me through twenty-four years of other people's decisions. No swell, no proof that the math I keep running has a physical answer growing three inches below my navel.
My palm presses flat against skin that looks exactly the same and feels like it belongs to someone I haven't met yet. The reflection stares back with amber eyes that don't know what they're looking at, and the secret beneath my hand weighs more than anything visible has a right to.
I pull my shirt down and the mirror holds the image one second longer—a woman alone in bad lighting, carrying something she can't show and can't set down. Soon it’s Blake's department, and I still have two coffee cups to steal.
________________