The insistent buzzing of the mobile phone finally died away against the dark grain of the low wooden table, leaving the apartment to the heavy, rattling rumble of a T9 commuter train passing along the rail corridor outside. Staring down at the silent screen, Ryan exhaled a slow, tired breath and turned back toward his small wooden desk. Beside his closed personal laptop and a cold ceramic tea mug, his eyes caught on a second square of bright stationery tucked beneath the edge of the keyboard—one he could have sworn hadn't been there a moment ago.
Frowning, he lifted the yellow paper under the harsh glow of the desk lamp. Scrawled across it in his own immaculate, sharp-angled block handwriting was a detailed breakdown of an executive strategy sync that supposedly took place earlier that Friday afternoon on the forty-second floor of the corporate tower—a high-level closed-door meeting he had never attended, complete with bullet points outlining the sign-off for unauthorized regional logistics transfers. The absurdity of holding physical evidence of an afternoon he had spent entirely at a hot-desk on level three ground heavily against the mundane reality of his cramped Rhodes apartment, the ink drying quietly under the flickering light of his desk lamp.