Michael's office was built for quiet power. Thick glass. Heavy wood. A view that looked expensive enough to make people feel small before they even sat down. But tonight, the room felt tighter than usual, like the walls were leaning in, listening.
He had been sitting behind his desk for almost an hour without doing anything productive. No emails. No meetings. No calls returned. Just one screen open on his tablet, watching the same graphs refresh like they were mocking him.
The curve had dipped.
It felt like a controlled decline to him, and it was making him go crazy.
Because it meant the noise around Dayo was not dying. It was stabilizing. It was settling into something sustainable, the kind of fame that stopped being a trend and started being infrastructure.
Michael tapped the desk once, hard enough to sting his knuckles, then reached for the intercom.
"Clara."
A beat.
