The Weight of Waiting

The coaxial **cable** lay severed across the floor like a dead snake, its copper guts exposed to the fluorescent office lights. Elena stared at it, at 11:47 PM on a Friday, while the rest of the forty-second floor hummed with the distant machinery of other people's lives.

Her phone buzzed. Marcus again. He'd been **running** through her excuses all week—the ones about finishing the quarter, the ones about needing space, the ones that weren't entirely lies but weren't entirely true either. He was the **friend** who'd become something more during the company retreat in Tucson, where the desert heat had made everything seem possible and tequila had made everything seem wise.

But Elena had stopped taking his calls three days ago.

She rubbed her **palm** against her temple, where a headache had taken up permanent residence since the meeting with Prescott—the VP who'd cornered her by the elevators with his wandering hands and his wandering promises. Prescott, the **bull** of the department, who'd built his career on other women's discomfort and called it 'mentoring.'

HR had given her a pamphlet on 'internal resolution pathways' and a pat on the shoulder.

'Have you tried setting clearer boundaries?' the woman had asked, as if Elena's entire life hadn't been an exercise in boundaries drawn in disappearing ink.

Elena stood up. Her legs had fallen asleep hours ago—pins and needles that matched everything else. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass, the city sprawled beneath them like a circuit board, all those lives connected and disconnected and reconnecting again.

The cable could stay severed. The email could go unsent. Prescott could find someone else to mentor, someone whose career aspirations aligned with his definition of professional development.

She picked up her phone. Marcus's name lit up the screen again.

'Want to get that drink?'

Elena typed back: 'Yes. Where?' and pressed send before she could remember all the reasons she shouldn't.