The creative floor was dark except for the weekend lighting, low amber strips along the baseboards that did nothing to dispel the shadows pooling between the empty desks. Martin walked through it slowly, his shoes no longer sounding like gunshots now that the marble had given way to the soft industrial carpet of the open plan office, the particular hush of a workspace with no one in it to disturb.
He had not been back here since she left.
He had told himself, in the weeks since, that this was simple practicality. He had no operational reason to walk the creative floor. His role required him on forty five, in boardrooms, in the executive corridor where decisions of consequence were made. There had never been a professional justification for standing in this particular stretch of open desks, and a man who did not allow himself unjustified things had simply not come.
He found her desk without needing to think about where it was.
