She stood in the center of the room, a silent statue amidst the wreckage of the bed. She wasn't looking at anything specific; she was staring through the air, her eyes glazed with the intense, internal labor of a woman organizing a massive influx of data.
Mike didn't move. He knew her rhythm.
She had a cognitive architecture that required space, a mental clearing where she could sort the chaos of the night from the demands of the day. To interrupt her now would be a tactical error; it would force her to provide the polished, superficial response she used in lectures, rather than the raw, unvarnished truth he wanted to strip from her.
The silence stretched, heavy and thick, until it became a physical weight in the room.
"You could say something," she said finally, her voice cutting through the stillness.
She didn't look at him yet, her gaze still fixed on some invisible point in the air. "It would be easier if you said something first."
