The ride was a quiet kind of noisy. City sounds filtered through: the low animal of traffic, a stray motorcycle pretending to be a dragon, the vendor calling out bottled water like it were poetry. Inside, leather and air-freshener tried to convince us they were neutral. I sat beside him in the back seat, documents on my lap, pretending they were a novel worth reading. The air felt thick, not with words but with all the words we didn't say.
"You didn't eat breakfast," he said, not looking at me, as if the window had told on me.
I blinked. "I had coffee, sir."
"Coffee isn't breakfast."
"I wasn't hungry."
He turned then, eyes an instrument he tunes by habit. "Learn to be. Hunger makes people weak."
There it was again: that voice that cuts but not to kill, the scalpel's cousin. I filed the moment away with the rest—a shelf labeled He's not wrong, but also, wow. I gave him a small, obedient smile. "Yes, Chairman."
The car ride was quiet. Manila outside was loud as usual—jeepneys, horns, tahovendors singing their morning hymns. Inside, the air smelled of leather and control.
Umlas Restaurant met us with low lighting and a confidence that priced the appetizers accordingly. Marble tables, waiters gliding like they were born knowing how to sidestep egos, the faint perfume of money trying not to smell like anything. Mr. Lopez greeted us at the entrance with a grin ten degrees too wide, handshakes that extended a beat longer than they should, and a laugh warmed up for any punchline he might supply himself.
"Chairman Vasquez! Always an honor."
"Let's make it quick," the Chairman said, sitting without comment on the chair placement the host had agonized over. "Time is money."
I took my seat to his right—note-taker, clock-watcher, human scanner of mood shifts. The conversation flowered, then pruned itself. They spoke the language of contracts and numbers, the kind where a single adjective can change a future and everyone pretends adjectives don't matter. The Chairman economized sentences the way surgeons economize blood loss. He didn't need volume. He had gravity. A glance from him made people audit themselves—posture straightened, verbs fixed, entire points abandoned mid-air like parachutes that refused to open.
At one point, when Mr. Lopez was explaining a clause with the enthusiasm of a magician revealing an old trick, I felt his attention—his attention—slide sideways. I looked up. Our eyes met: my pulse, instant sprinter. I dropped my gaze first, unwilling to play chicken with an ice floe.
"Miss Bones," he said, the evenness of his tone somehow more intimate than if he'd said my name softer. "Note the revision on clause three."
"Yes, Chairman." My hand was steady; my heart bounced like it owed someone money.
When the meeting ended, Mr. Lopez's smile was still working overtime. He shook my hand like he was signing me to a minor league team. "You're very efficient, Miss Bones. The Chairman's lucky to have you."
A muscle in the Chairman's jaw acknowledged the comment without volunteering to like it. "She's good because she knows how to listen," he said, cool as chrome.
I almost rolled my eyes. Almost. Professionalism is ninety percent eye control.
Outside, on the way back to the car, the tension that travels with him seemed to loosen half a notch, as if the city air had demanded a toll and he actually paid.
"You did well," he said, hands tucked into his pockets in that way that makes suits look like they were designed for him personally. "You didn't let Lopez talk over you."
Praise from him is a rare bird—if you see it, you are obligated to observe quietly from a distance. "Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me for competence," he replied, a brief nod to the thing he believes is the bare minimum. "Maintain it."
A smile tried to happen on my face. I allowed a small version, the office-safe kind. "Understood."
Back in the car, we reclaimed our seats and the familiar not-quite silence. I watched the city mark his reflection into pieces as we passed—buildings slicing his profile into stripes, then reassembling it on the next pane of glass. His hands rested on his knees, elegant but not soft. There's a small scar across his right knuckle. I'd noticed it before and, as usual, didn't ask. People like him rarely offer origin stories; the myth is more useful.
"Do you think I'm difficult to work with?" he asked, eyes still on the window, as if asking me to answer his reflection.
The question moved my spine. He doesn't do hypotheticals. He does outcomes. I paused for the length of one truth swallowed and one truth released. "You demand perfection," I said. "That scares people."
He turned to me fully now. "And you? Are you scared?"
"Sometimes," I admitted, because if I lied, the car would judge me.
He didn't flinch. "Good. Fear keeps people sharp."
I let out a small, humorless laugh that belonged to everyone who ever had to be sharp to keep their job. "Or broken."
He breathed out—slow, not dramatic, like he was setting a glass down carefully. "Broken people make the best leaders, Miss Bones." His voice didn't change temperature. "They already know what pain costs."
Tahimik. The kind of silence that means something. The city outside blurred by. Somewhere between the skyscrapers and exhaust fumes, I realized: ruthlessness has a reason. Loneliness, too.
In the diffuse light flickering through the window, I saw what you are not supposed to see when you work for a man like him if you want to keep the categories clean. I saw the outline of someone who had traded softness for efficiency, mercy for accuracy, comfort for control. I saw walls built so high and so well that the builder forgot where the door used to be. Ruthless men are easier to survive than haunted ones; at least with the ruthless, you never mistake the knife for a key.
The city kept going. It always does. The clock on the dash was proud of itself for being exact. We passed the park where joggers punished or forgave themselves—hard to say which—and the street where the same old vendor sells the same old bottled water to new people every day. Life, the great copier.
Back at the building, the lobby smelled faintly of floor polish and ambition. We stepped out. He didn't say another word. He rarely does when conversation threatens to become something that might have to be acknowledged later. The elevator did its small opera of numbers. The doors opened. We stepped inside.
On the ride up, I studied the seam where the elevator wall meets the floor. It's perfect. No gap, no flaw. Someone did their job so well that no one sees it. That is a kind of immortality.
When the doors parted on our floor, the office looked exactly as we had left it, as if time here gets folded neatly and tucked under the monitor stands whenever we're away. Alma's empty desk pinched the air. Two other chairs, two other absences. My coworkers were busy at being busy, their focus exaggerated the way you tilt your head at your laptop to let the universe know you are wed to productivity.
I took my post outside his glass door again, the border guard with good posture. Inside, he set his jacket on the back of his chair in a way that would give a stylist feelings. He stood for a moment by the window, hands in his pockets again, the skyline a mirror he either interrogates or hides in; it's hard to tell which. His outline softened by the tint, he looked—for a moment you could miss if you blinked—almost human, and that almost made my throat feel too small.
I checked the calendar. Confirmed the 4 p.m. call. Flagged an email about contracts someone hoped would jump the queue. My phone buzzed—a team chat saying nothing with great urgency. I replied with a thumbs-up emoji that could mean anything and nothing and everything, depending on the day.
There's a myth in offices like ours that proximity equals privilege. Maybe. Sometimes. But sometimes it just means you can hear the ice crack before everyone else. Sometimes it means you know exactly how much silence weighs. Sometimes it means you get asked questions in cars that put a mirror inside your chest, and you tell the truth because lies don't fit in that small a space.
He opened the door. "The 3:30 moved to 3:45," he said.
"Yes, Chairman," I replied. My voice does that thing—cool, oiled, ready.
He hesitated—a fraction, a seam. "Eat something," he added, almost as if the sentence had escaped without clearance.
"I will," I said, and did not add I'll try, because he doesn't like verbs that wobble.
The door closed. The clock resumed ticking like it thought it invented time. Somewhere in the office, a stapler misfired. I thought about Alma's flamingo pens, about Richard's hollow eyes, about Miss Rero's trembling mouth. I thought about broken people and leadership and the math of pain. I thought about the first day I walked into this building in shoes that hurt on purpose, and the vow I made to myself to become indispensable enough to be tolerated.
And I thought, the way you think when you've seen enough to know better but still believe in some small corner of mercy: there is a man in there, and a chairman, and only one of them knows how to be forgiven.
I opened my planner. The afternoon sat there, obedient, waiting to be managed. I lifted my pen.
Work resumed. Life, the copier, pressed down hard.