Here is the story so far, followed by the new beat:
---
Dara had a sticky note on her laptop that said *mute yourself* in her own handwriting, which she'd written after the third time she'd forgotten and her neighbor's leaf blower had filled a Monday standup. The sticky note had been there so long the adhesive had given up and she'd reattached it with a small piece of scotch tape. Her kitchen table in Tucson held the laptop, a bowl of cereal going soft in two percent milk, and her phone propped against a coffee mug from a conference she'd attended in 2019 - the last one, the one where she'd gotten a tote bag and a lanyard and shaken hands with people whose Slack avatars she now knew better than their faces. The Slack channel was moving the way water moves when something large has just gone under - fast, and without her.
She'd moved the lamp so many times there was a pale ring in the dust where it used to live, and she moved it again now, two inches left - then one inch back. The webcam got a thumb's worth of tilt until the basket with the inside-out jeans vanished below the frame. Forty seconds. She wet two fingers and pressed them against the piece of hair that did the thing, checked the mug was out of shot, and typed *here* into the chat before her camera even finished loading.
Glenn's thumbnail blinked alive at 2:07 and she answered it in the sweatshirt with the bleach spot near the hem, the one she'd slept in the night before with the hood bunched under her neck. His window was right behind his left ear - not a window the way her kitchen window was a window, with the gap in the blinds and the neighbor's oleander pressing through it - but a real one, floor-to-ceiling, and the parking lot behind it had maybe fourteen cars in it, silver and dark blue in the afternoon light, and she thought she recognized the red Jeep that belonged to the woman whose name she kept having to look up in the directory. Glenn was saying something about bandwidth and she nodded and moved the bleach spot to her lap - under the frame, and kept nodding.
The PDF took a moment to load, and in that moment she ate the last soft loop of cereal. Rishi's name was there, and below it Caroline's, and she knew Caroline from a headshot on the team page where she was standing in front of a whiteboard with a dry-erase marker - mid-sentence, caught in the middle of saying something to someone just outside the frame. Dara's cursor sat on the blue underline of *Request Feedback* long enough that her screen dimmed. She closed the laptop and moved the lamp back to where the dust ring was.
The light through the gap in the blinds made a stripe across the closed laptop, and she stood there in the bleach-spot sweatshirt with the sticky note pinched between her thumb and first finger, the scotch tape edge catching the pad of her thumb the way a paper cut almost does. Outside, the oleander was doing nothing. She smoothed the note against the lid - *mute yourself* face-up, and pressed it flat with her palm until the tape held again.
