He had been staring at the television for forty minutes without registering a single thing on it.
The screen was on—some financial news programme he'd turned to by habit and then immediately stopped watching—and the living room held the specific quality of a large house in the middle of a weekday afternoon, the kind of quiet that felt different from the productive quiet of a working day. Heavier. More aware of itself.
He hadn't gone into the office.
He'd told himself it was because he had calls to make from home, documents to review, things that didn't require him to be physically present at Ashford Technologies. All of that was true. None of it was why he was sitting on the couch at two in the afternoon staring at a muted television.
