**LILA POV**
A long workday leaves its mark before I’m willing to admit it has.
It settles in gradually, the way strain always does when I refuse to name it early. Fewer breaks than usual. Meetings stacked too close together, bleeding into one another without the courtesy of pause. Conversations that require more attention than they should, because everyone is carrying something they don’t want to say out loud and trying not to let it spill. The packhouse hums with contained urgency, not panic, not chaos, just pressure managed through routine. I move through it on discipline alone, shoulders squared, jaw set, attention clipped to what matters and nothing else. By late afternoon, tension has worked its way into my muscles like something earned rather than inflicted, the kind you almost re
