He had been watching me for longer than I realized.
That was the part I could not stop turning over afterward, the understanding that Charles had been assembling his own quiet file on what was wrong with me while I had been so focused on managing his perception that I had stopped accurately reading it. I had been performing composure so consistently that I assumed the performance was holding. I had been wrong.
It started on a Tuesday morning during a standing review of the subsidiary reports. I was seated across from him at the smaller working table in his office and I had been fine when I sat down. Controlled, present, tracking the numbers with the appropriate fraction of my attention while the rest of it managed the persistent nausea that had become the texture of every morning for weeks.
And then the wave arrived, the deep, sweeping escalation that no longer gave me the courtesy of a warning before it came.
