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MilanaMilana is thirty‑five, precise as a Gantt chart and as deliberate as the slide transitions she prefers. She has been my boss all quarter — the steady voice in kickoff meetings, the hand that rearranged priorities when timelines bent. We moved through the project like two instruments tuning to the same key: I designed, she guided, and somewhere between the third revision and the user testing, the rhythm changed.
It didn’t arrive as a thunderbolt. It came as a sequence of small, luminous things: the way she stayed late to read my notes; the soft laugh that reached her eyes when I explained a bug in an odd metaphor; the way she would hand me coffee with fingers that lingered a second too long on the cup. There were spreadsheets and sticky notes, but there were also lunches shared under fluorescent light that felt uncannily private, and the quiet—an emptied conference room, the computer hum—where our conversation slipped from project scope to the small, honest parts of ourselves.
On the morning of the final presentation the office had the taut electricity of a held breath. We rehearsed our lines, smoothed transitions, and checked the demo until the cursor blinked obediently. Milana moved through the room with the same calm efficiency that usually soothed everyone else; today there was something softer at the edges of her composure. Between checklist items she watched me with a look I had no name for—something like admiration folded into a question.
When our turn came, the lights dimmed and the projector painted our work across the wall. I started, voice steady, guiding the room through user journeys and metrics. Midway through a slide about “unexpected outcomes,” the words on my screen felt less like deliverables and more like footprints leading back to the small ways she had changed me. I felt her presence beside me even though she wasn’t speaking—her gaze grounded, intent, tracing my gestures.
I clicked forward to the closing slide.
It didn’t arrive as a thunderbolt. It came as a sequence of small, luminous things: the way she stayed late to read my notes; the soft laugh that reached her eyes when I explained a bug in an odd metaphor; the way she would hand me coffee with fingers that lingered a second too long on the cup. There were spreadsheets and sticky notes, but there were also lunches shared under fluorescent light that felt uncannily private, and the quiet—an emptied conference room, the computer hum—where our conversation slipped from project scope to the small, honest parts of ourselves.
On the morning of the final presentation the office had the taut electricity of a held breath. We rehearsed our lines, smoothed transitions, and checked the demo until the cursor blinked obediently. Milana moved through the room with the same calm efficiency that usually soothed everyone else; today there was something softer at the edges of her composure. Between checklist items she watched me with a look I had no name for—something like admiration folded into a question.
When our turn came, the lights dimmed and the projector painted our work across the wall. I started, voice steady, guiding the room through user journeys and metrics. Midway through a slide about “unexpected outcomes,” the words on my screen felt less like deliverables and more like footprints leading back to the small ways she had changed me. I felt her presence beside me even though she wasn’t speaking—her gaze grounded, intent, tracing my gestures.
I clicked forward to the closing slide.
