“No,” you say. “I’m in charge of whether security arrives before evidence gets wiped and whoever planted this hears us coming through the wrong channel.”
The line hangs between you.
Alejandra Ruiz is not accustomed to being told no in her own office. You see the instinctive resistance flash through her shoulders. Then something cooler takes over. Respect, maybe. Or necessity wearing the first shoes it found.
“What do you need from me?”
There it is again.
The better question.
You almost answer immediately. Then, because you have spent enough evenings around her to know instinct can be misleading in rooms like this, you ask your own.
“Why did you ask about the date?”
She blinks.
Of all the possible directions, this one clearly did not make her shortlist.
“What?”
“When I came in.” You zip the evidence sleeve into your bag. “You asked if she was prettier than you.”
Now she really goes still.
For a moment the office stops being a crime scene and becomes something stranger. The city outside glows indifferent. The hidden bridge sits in your kit like a bad secret with circuit traces. You stand in worn gray cotton and server dust. She stands barefoot now, having slipped off her heels without you noticing, because some women are too practiced at holding pain elegantly for small sounds to betray them.
“That matters to you right now?” she asks softly.
“Everything matters right now.”
That is true in your life more often than you enjoy admitting. A person’s offhand joke. A delayed login token. A polished man’s smile in a board elevator. One thing is often another thing wearing a smaller shirt.
Alejandra looks down at the pen still in her hand as if she doesn’t remember picking it up. Then she sets it on the desk.
“It was a joke,” she says.
“No.”
She lifts her eyes. The room changes again.
Because now whatever she says next will not be for the board, the market, the city, or the magazine profiles that insist on calling her ruthless because they cannot think of a more original word for a woman who refuses to tremble in public.
“It wasn’t only a joke,” she says.
You wait.
Her laugh this time is almost invisible. More breath than sound.
“You disappear into that server room all day like a man hiding from civilization,” she says. “You say exactly fourteen words at a time unless someone mentions packet loss or bad coffee. And then yesterday, in the elevator, you told me you had a date tonight.”
“That is accurate.”
“With a woman from an app?”
You blink once. “You’re informed.”
“I’m observant.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It is when I decide it is.”
There is the CEO again, briefly. The controlled edge. The flick of power. But it softens before it can fully settle.
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