The room service arrived exactly twenty-two minutes later. The aroma of freshly ground beans and buttered toast cut through the sterile hotel air, grounding the morning in something mundane and physical.
They ate at the small table beside the window, bathed in the unforgiving clarity of the morning light.
The conversation was deceptively normal. Maya spoke about the District 2 piece and the structural fractures she intended to exploit in her narrative, and Mike asked questions about sequencing and about the logical flow of her visual evidence.
It was the conversation of two people who had shared something primal and unvarnished the night before and were now retreating into the safety of intellectual discourse.
There was no awkwardness, no performative apology for their intimacy. Instead, there was a specific, unspoken agreement: they would let the night exist as it was, neither inflating it into a grand romance nor diminishing it into a casual mistake.
