It happened at twenty past ten on a Thursday morning, in the executive bathroom two floors below Charles's office.
I had been in a briefing for ninety minutes, seated to Charles's left at the long conference table while his operations director walked through the third-quarter logistics projections. The room was warm. The presentation was thorough. I had been tracking the numbers with the appropriate fraction of my attention while the rest of it managed the quiet and persistent nausea that had become the background condition of every morning for the past three weeks.
I had become adept at managing it. Small, careful meals before any professional engagement. Water at regular intervals. Controlled breathing when the sensation sharpened. I had turned it into a protocol, one more thing to manage, one more variable to account for in the careful architecture of how I moved through each day. It was inconvenient. It was not insurmountable.
Until it was.
