I notice the name plate first.
It appears on a Tuesday morning, while I’m still holding my coffee with both hands and pretending the rest of the world doesn’t exist yet. Small, brass-edged, slightly crooked. ROHAN MEHTA. Placed on the desk that has been empty for six weeks, the desk that sits close enough to mine that I can hear whatever music leaks from someone’s headphones.
I set my coffee down very carefully.
Because I know that name.
—
He walks in at nine-fourteen. I know because I’m watching the clock, pretending to proofread a report I finished two days ago. He’s carrying a cardboard box and wearing a jacket that doesn’t quite belong in a mid-level architecture firm in Edinburgh — too nice, slightly too confident, the kind of jacket that says I know exactly what I’m doing and I’d like you to notice.
I look back at my screen.
Rohan Mehta. The same Rohan Mehta who submitted the competing proposal for the Cairn Street development last spring. The same proposal that beat mine by four points on the client scorecard. Four points. I had memorized that number in the way you memorize a small, specific humiliation.
He sets the box down on his new desk. Looks around the office with the calm, easy expression of someone who has walked into rooms like this a hundred times. And then, because the universe has a sense of humor that I have never appreciated, his eyes land on me.
He smiles.
Not a smug smile. That would be easier.
“Meera Nair,” he says, like my name is something he’s been carrying around in his pocket and is only now taking out. “I didn’t know you worked here.”
“I do,” I say. Very professionally.
—
ROHAN
I didn’t know she worked here. That part is completely true. I’m repeating it to myself like a mantra as I unpack my box and try not to look at the woman sitting four feet to my left.
Meera Nair. I know her work better than she probably realizes. The Cairn Street proposal — hers — was better than mine in almost every way that matters. Better materials analysis, more sensitive to the surrounding streetscape, a stronger community consultation section. The only reason mine scored higher was the cost modeling, which is the part of architecture that feels least like architecture.
I’ve thought about that competition more than is probably healthy.
I’ve thought about her more than is probably healthy, if I’m being honest with myself, which I’m trying to be.
She’s not looking at me now. She’s looking at her screen with the focused intensity of someone who is absolutely, definitely not thinking about me at all. There’s a small succulent on the corner of her desk and a coffee cup that says something I can’t read from here and a stack of drawings held together with a binder clip, and all of it feels like a world I’m being permitted to observe from just outside the glass.
I arrange my pencils in a cup. I open my laptop. I do not look at her.
This is going to be a problem.
—
By Thursday we have established a careful, polite silence.
It has its own texture. It isn’t unfriendly. We say good morning. We say excuse me when one of us reaches across the shared table edge for the stapler. We have divided the communal desk space with the diplomatic precision of two countries negotiating a border — my drawings on the left, his laptop slightly angled away on the right, a neutral zone of approximately eight inches in the middle.
I am very aware of the eight inches.
On Friday afternoon he says, without looking up from his screen, “Your section detail on the east elevation is wrong.”
I look up.
“Excuse me?”
He nods at the drawing I’ve pinned to the partition between our desks. “The flashing. It’ll channel water directly into the cavity wall. I’m not trying to — I just noticed.”
I look at the drawing. I look at it for a long time.
He’s right.
“Thank you,” I say, in a voice that conveys absolutely nothing.
He nods and goes back to his screen. And I sit there with the strange, uncomfortable warmth of being seen by someone I was trying very hard not to be seen by.
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