**DEREK POV**
I replay the office moment more times than I should.
Not because I want to. Because my mind keeps circling it the way it circles an unsolved problem, convinced there is something unfinished lodged in the exchange, something it failed to catalogue properly the first time through. I have always trusted my ability to assess situations cleanly, to identify variables, to isolate cause and effect. This refuses to resolve that way. Every time I think I have reduced it to something incidental, it resurfaces with weight.
The brush of contact was brief. Incidental on the surface. The kind of thing that happens a hundred times a day in shared spaces when people move past each other without choreography or intent. Halls, offices, doorways. People adjust unconsciously. Hands pass. Shou
