Mike watched her, seeing the exhaustion behind the precision. "Huh..."
"Kyle must appreciate that," he said.
The remark was a surgical strike, delivered with a tone so even it was almost unnerving. It was a sentence constructed to be unremarkable, a smooth stone tossed into a still pond, but Madison didn't just hear the words; she felt the displacement of the water.
She processed the comment with the full, terrifying computational power of a woman who had built a career on mastering surfaces, which meant she was a master at recognizing the tectonic shifts occurring beneath them.
"He does," she said.
The brevity of her response was more deafening than a long, defensive elaboration would have been. It was a wall of sound, short and impenetrable.
Mike said nothing. He didn't offer a follow-up or a softening grace note.
He simply let the silence expand, allowing the weight of the unspoken to settle between them like heavy dust.
