Ellie held his gaze, and for a long, heavy moment, the air between them hummed with an unspoken tension. There was a specific look in her eyes, a flicker of something profound and unmoored, that appeared whenever she looked at him.
It was a look that transcended the architecture of their conversation, a look that acknowledged the silent, structural cracks forming in the foundation of her life.
"When did you get so good at this?" she asked, her voice barely a ripple in the vastness of the plaza.
"At what?" Mike replied, his tone neutral, though his mind was racing, analyzing the shift in her frequency.
"Saying the thing that makes everything land differently," she said, her eyes searching his. "The way you can strip a concept down to its barest, most brutal truth without making it a spectacle."
"Without making it bigger than it is."
"I've been in a lot of conversations, Ellie," Mike said.
He offered a modest deflection, but he knew it was a hollow shield.
