Chapter 6: The Migraine

The seven o'clock meeting ran long.

It always did. Roman knew this and had stopped fighting it two years ago. He showed up at six forty-five with coffee and no breakfast, same as every Thursday, and sat at the head of the conference table until the room finally cleared at nine fifteen.

He went straight into a follow-up with Hartwell. Then a legal call. Then a stack of documents that had been waiting since Tuesday. Priya left a coffee on the corner of his desk sometime around ten. He drank half of it cold without noticing.

At eleven-oh-four, the pressure arrived behind his left eye.

It always started there. Not sharp. Just a steady push, like a thumb pressing from the inside, specific enough that he knew exactly what was building. He had thirty minutes, maybe forty, before it went from manageable to the kind of pain that made screen light feel like something physical hitting his face.

He opened his desk drawer.

The sticky note sat in the top left corner where he had pressed it back down four days ago. Her handwriting. Small and even. Aspirin, top left. You always forget.

He checked the top left corner of the drawer. A dish of paperclips. Two pens. Nothing else.

He checked the back. A charging cable. Parking stubs he had never thrown away. He pulled the second drawer open. Folders, a USB drive, a business card holder. He tried the third. More folders.

He sat back in his chair and pressed two fingers against his left eye socket.

He got up and went to the cabinet behind his desk where he kept personal things. Antacids, a spare tie, throat lozenges from a cold he had had in February. He moved everything to one side. Checked behind the lozenges. Nothing.

Priya appeared in the doorway with a contract revision.

"Do you have anything for a headache?" he asked.

She looked at him the way his assistant looked at him when she was deciding whether to say something. She decided not to. "Ibuprofen. I keep some at my desk."

"Please."

She came back with two tablets and a glass of water. He swallowed them and thanked her and sat back down and already knew it would not touch it. Ibuprofen was fine for the ordinary kind. This was not the ordinary kind. This was the specific Thursday migraine that came from skipping breakfast under pressure, and the only thing that worked for it was a prescription he had not once filled himself in three years because it had simply always been there when he needed it.

He put his hand over his left eye and called Isabella.

"Roman! Perfect timing. Are you free tonight? I found this new place on the west side that everyone is talking about and I thought we could,"

"I have a migraine," he said. "The bad kind. Do you know where my prescription medication is? Not the generic. The specific one."

A pause. "In your bathroom cabinet?"

"I'm at the office."

"Oh." Another pause, shorter. "Just take some Tylenol, babe. You'll be fine."

He looked at the sticky note in his open drawer. "Right," he said. "I'll figure it out."

He hung up.

He asked Priya to cancel his noon meeting. Then he closed his office door, turned the overhead lights off, and sat in the dark with one hand pressed flat over his left eye.

Twenty minutes. The pressure peaked and held and very slowly began to pull back, not gone but reduced to something he could function through. Ibuprofen doing what it could, which was not enough but was something.

He sat in the quiet and thought about the fact that she had known it was always the left eye. He had never told her that. He could not remember ever telling anyone that. She had just noticed, at some point during three years of watching him come home with his hand over his face, which side it was always on. She had paid that kind of attention to him and he had not known it was happening.

He sat with that for a long time.

…

He left the office at six. Priya raised one eyebrow and said nothing.

Isabella was out for the evening, a dinner with friends. The penthouse was quiet when he came in. He put his jacket down and went to the bedroom first, checked the bathroom cabinet automatically, found his things on one shelf and empty space on the other. He checked the nightstand drawer. Nothing.

He was not sure what he was doing. The medication had been at the penthouse, he had told Isabella that, but things had moved since Sera left. Not all at once. Gradually. Isabella put her products on the bathroom shelf. The kitchen cabinet labels had been partly peeled off and not replaced. Things had been shifted without being relocated anywhere specific.

He went to the kitchen. The kettle was on before he decided to put it on. He stood at the counter and waited for it, not really seeing the room.

His eyes went to the cabinet above the coffee machine out of habit, the one he had watched Isabella search through on her first morning here. He opened it. Moved a mug to reach the one behind it.

His fingers touched something.

A flat rectangle, light, tucked against the back wall of the shelf behind the second row of mugs. He moved two cups and reached in.

A blister pack. His prescription. One dose left, foil still intact. The pharmacy label on the back had his name on it.

He stood at the kitchen counter and looked at it.

She had put a backup here. Behind the mugs, out of sight, somewhere it would not be moved or thrown out accidentally, somewhere it would just exist quietly in case he needed it after she was gone. She had stocked a second supply in a location she chose specifically because it was the kind of place he would eventually look, not right away, but eventually.

She had known he would need it and not have it.

She had planned for that.

Roman stood there for a long time with the blister pack sitting in his open palm, the kitchen silent around him, the kettle starting to hiss on the counter behind him.

…