The Weight of Empty Offices

The forty-second floor cable snapped with a sound like a breaking heart, sending Miranda's monitor plunging toward the carpet below. She watched it fall, feeling strangely detached. Three years of climbing the corporate pyramid, and this was her legacy: a broken screen and a bruised ego.

"You okay?" David asked from the neighboring cubicle. He didn't look up from his spreadsheet.

"Fine. Just... fine."

She couldn't bear to tell him the truth—that she'd spent the morning interviewing with a competitor, that her father's voice still echoed in her head, "Settle down, Miranda. Find something stable." That the pyramid scheme of her twenties—multilevel marketing, crypto scams, miracle supplements—had left her credit in ruins and her marriage in tatters.

David stood and walked over, leaning against her desk. "Management's offering buyouts. Did you see the email?"

"I saw it."

"I'm taking it," he said quietly. "I'm forty-five, Miranda. I can't keep pretending this means something."

The cable modem on her desk flickered its status light, a dying pulse in a room full of artificial light. Somewhere below, the city continued its indifferent rotation.

"What will you do?" she asked.

"My brother has a cabin in Montana. Bear country," David smiled, almost to himself. "I figure it's time to learn how to be something other than a quarterly report."

Miranda looked at her broken monitor, then at the man who'd sat beside her through three rounds of layoffs. She thought about the pyramid she'd been climbing—how from a distance it looked like success, but up close, it was just bodies pressed against bodies, everyone pushing toward a peak that kept receding.

"Do you think," she asked, "that we could bear it? Starting over?"

David's answer was the gentle warmth of his hand on her shoulder, the first real touch she'd felt in this tower of glass and steel.

"Only together," he said.

Outside, the Manhattan skyline glittered like a conspiracy of stars, and somewhere between what she'd lost and what she might yet find, Miranda finally began to breathe.