The top floor is quietest at seven in the morning.

This is the hour Adrian prefers. Before the assistants arrive, before the phones begin, before the day assembles itself into the relentless machinery of other people's needs and expectations. He has taken his coffee at the window for eleven years — black, no sugar, still hot enough to be unpleasant — and watched the city wake up below with the detached interest of a man observing a species he no longer considers himself part of.

He is not sentimental about it. It is simply routine.

You arrive at seven-twelve.

He doesn't look up from the report on his desk. He knows it's you by the sound — the particular rhythm of your footsteps in the hallway, slightly quicker than everyone else's, as though you are perpetually making up for time lost somewhere earlier in the morning. He has noticed this without meaning to. He notices most things without meaning to. It is a professional hazard and nothing more.

You knock twice, which is correct, and enter on his silence, which is also correct, and cross to the desk with the revised acquisition brief he asked for yesterday afternoon.

You place it exactly where he indicated.

He picks it up.

Reads.

The correction on page four is right. The reformatted figures on page seven are right. The summary he told you to condense — three times, to three different lengths, because the first two were wrong — is, this time, correct.

He sets it down.

Says nothing.

This is the moment, in Adrian's experience, where people make their mistake. Where they stand too long waiting for acknowledgment, or fill the silence with something unnecessary, or ask — did I do it right, is that what you wanted, should I change anything — the particular verbal tic of someone who needs approval badly enough to reach for it out loud.

You turn to leave.

He watches you go.

Something small and structural shifts in the back of his mind — the way a single tile moves and draws attention to the floor it belongs to. Seven days. You have been here seven days, which is longer than the last three combined, and you have not cried in the stairwell as far as he is aware, and you have not complained to HR, and you have not looked at him once with that particular expression he has grown accustomed to — the one that is equal parts intimidation and resentment, the one that reminds him, consistently, that the distance between himself and other people is both deliberate and permanent.

You just look at him like he's a problem with a solution.

He finds this — irritating is the wrong word.

He finds it something.

You pause at the door.

"The Henderson file," you say, without turning around. "You have a call with him at nine. His assistant sent updated terms this morning. I've flagged three clauses I think you'll want to push back on before the call."

A beat.

"I left the notes on the left side of the brief. You seem to read left margin first."

Silence.

You leave.

Adrian looks at the brief. At the left margin. At the notes written in your small, precise handwriting — correctly flagged, correctly reasoned, requiring almost no adjustment.

He looks at the door.

Seven days.

He picks up his coffee. It has gone cold, which he does not notice, because he is still looking at the door with the expression of a man who has just heard a sound in a room he was certain was empty — not alarmed, not unsettled.

Just.

Paying attention.

He does not examine this further.

He opens the Henderson file.

But his eyes drift, once, back to the margin notes — to the handwriting that somehow already knows which side he reads first — and something behind his sternum performs a movement so small and so long dormant that it takes him a full three seconds to identify it.

He does not identify it.

He turns the page.

The city hums forty floors below, and Adrian Hawthorne sits in his glass tower with cold coffee and a hairline crack somewhere in the architecture of himself that he has not yet decided to acknowledge.

Not yet.