Slide Four, River North

She knows exactly where he is sitting.

Third row, left side, one seat in from the aisle. She clocked him when she set her laptop on the podium — the way you clock a variable before a negotiation, because variables that go untracked become surprises, and surprises kill outcomes. She did not look at him again after that. She has been presenting for eleven minutes.

The slide advances to the Q3 comparison. She speaks the number cleanly — *eighteen percent, year over year* — and in the same moment something shifts low in her body, a change in frequency she registers the way you register a barometric drop before the weather turns. Not a sound. Not a jolt. A settling into a new register, continuous and precise, and she understands immediately that he has moved the setting up.

The handout is in her left hand. The laser pointer is in her right. She does not change which hand holds which.

She continues speaking.

The ponte knit of the dress holds its line — she knows because she checked it twice in the elevator mirror this morning, smoothing the fabric over her hips with both palms, thinking: *this is either very smart or a catastrophic error in judgment*. The fabric sits against her without a slip between them, and the vibration moves through it directly, a warmth that has been building since low and is now something she cannot catalog as small. Her left hand holds the handout. Her right hand holds the pointer. She is explaining the methodology.

Somewhere in her sternum, a breath gathers and does not release on schedule. She lets it out a half-beat late, through her nose, controlled enough that no one in the room would name it. She advances the slide.

She makes the note in the margin without looking down — muscle memory from years of annotating while listening, the pen moving while her eyes stay on the screen. The letters are smaller than her usual hand. *Do not look at him during Q&A.* She underlines it once.

Because she knows what would happen if she did. She knows the specific quality of attention he would be wearing — the patience of someone who has already decided how this ends and is simply waiting for her to finish the presentation. She knows her own face well enough to know she cannot afford to see that expression while forty people are watching her explain the revenue model.

She clicks to the next slide.

The setting does not change. It stays exactly where he put it — medium, sustained, a pressure she cannot ignore and has not, for the last four minutes, stopped being aware of. Her thighs are together under the dress. The fabric holds. She is standing at the front of a River North conference room in January, the city grey and cold beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass, and somewhere in the third row he is watching her hold herself completely still.

She advances the slide. She speaks the next number cleanly.

She does not look at him.