She moved toward the door with the sharp, clinical decisiveness of a woman executing a tactical retreat. Every step was a calculated strike against her own hesitation, a way to ensure that no flicker of doubt could retroactively undermine the decision she had just made to walk away.
She was a woman of structure, and right now, she was using that structure to rebuild her walls in real time.
She reached the threshold.
She stopped.
It was a momentary lapse, a hairline fracture in her momentum. It lasted perhaps three seconds, but in the heavy, pressurized silence of that room, three seconds felt like an eternity.
It was three seconds longer than the version of her that had stumbled into this room last night would have ever allowed herself. In those three seconds, the professor vanished, and the woman remained, caught between the urge to turn back and the desperate need to survive the moment.
"The paper," she said, her voice cutting through the stillness.
