Electricity in the Breakroom

Sarah watched the baseball game from the twenty-seventh floor, her forehead pressed against the glass. Down on the field—really just a distant patch of green—players moved like ants through a picnic. She'd missed her daughter's game last Tuesday. Again. The mergers and acquisitions deadline had demanded it.

She peeled an orange at her desk, the citrus spray hitting her eyes. She'd stopped crying about work-life balance three years ago. Now she just made lists and crossed things off. The orange segments sat in a neat row, mocking her with their organized perfection.

The storm had been building all afternoon. Lightning cracked across the sky—a violent stroke that illuminated the empty office. Morgan was still here too, somewhere down the hall. They'd had that thing in the conference room last month, hands sliding under blazers, breath fogging the glass wall. They hadn't spoken since.

She saw it then: a fox on the fire escape, sleek and improbable against the brutalist architecture. It moved with deliberate grace, completely at home in this alien landscape. The fox looked up at her, eyes catching the lightning flash, and Sarah felt something crack open in her chest.

Her phone buzzed. Her ex-husband, probably wanting to switch weekends. Again. The orange sat untouched on her desk, beginning to brown at the edges.

Outside, the rain finally broke. The fox shook its coat and disappeared into the urban wild, while Sarah stood at her window watching a baseball game she couldn't follow, holding an orange she didn't want, wondering how she'd become the kind of person who watched life from twenty-seven floors up.

The lightning struck again. This time, she turned away from the window and walked toward Morgan's office. Some things, she decided, were worth burning for.