The office smelled like burnt coffee and frustration.
I pushed open the blue door with my hip, balancing two foil-wrapped kebab sandwiches and a plastic container of homemade tabbouleh in my arms. The silence hit me first, no frantic typing, no heated discussions about coding languages I barely understood. Just the whirring of an overworked ceiling fan and the faint hum of a single laptop.
Rami sat slumped at his desk, his head buried in his hands, fingers digging into his scalp like he wanted to peel back his own skin. The whiteboard behind him was a battlefield of half-erased equations and angry question marks.
I set the food down carefully, the crinkling of foil too loud in the hollow quiet. "Habibi?"
He didn’t move.
I touched his shoulder, and he flinched, before looking up at me with bloodshot eyes. The laptop screen reflected on his glasses, lines of code scrolling endlessly like they’d written themselves into a noose.
"They left," he said. His voice was scraped raw.
