While He Waits
Dæmon arrived ten minutes late. Not shamefully late—just enough to feel it.
The coworking lobby was too modern, too calm. Warm wood paneling, neutral-toned couches, carefully curated ferns. Behind the front desk, a receptionist glanced up and smiled as he tapped his keycard at the gate.
“Hey there,” she said automatically.
“Hey,” he replied, walking through.
He didn’t need coffee. He'd already had one. But he poured a little into a ceramic mug anyway, out of habit—a small ritual, a way to buy himself a moment of stillness before stepping into someone else's expectations. The office air was scrubbed and lemon-tinged, artificially fresh. Acoustic panels hung like soft clouds overhead, too perfect to notice unless you were trying not to think about anything else.
He wandered toward the waiting area—modular seating, exposed concrete, a wall-mounted screen playing muted looped ads for productivity tools he’d already used and already forgotten.
The meeting room was still dark.
The person he was supposed to meet hadn’t arrived.
Of course.
He sat, sipped the too-hot coffee, and looked around. A young woman in oversized headphones sat nearby, sketching on a tablet. Two guys in fleece vests argued quietly over the accuracy of a spreadsheet. One of them said:
“It’s not about what’s true, it’s about what people act on.”
The sentence landed.
He froze, breath shallow. The words echoed, not in volume but in shape. Something about them scratched at the walls of an older thought—like the fragment of a forgotten song he once knew how to hum but could never quite finish.
His gaze drifted, and suddenly he wasn’t in the coworking space anymore.
He was younger. College maybe. Or just after. Sitting on a patio at dusk. A friend—bright, funny, cynical—saying something in passing.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s true. We do what works. Always have.”
There’d been laughter. A beer between them. But something in that moment had disturbed him. The way the streetlamp had lit the condensation on the glass. And the silence that followed—brief, but sharp—before someone changed the subject.
It hadn’t landed then.
Now it did.
The memory trembled on the edge of something bigger—something frightening and clarifying at the same time. The idea that the world didn’t need to be real. Just actionable.
His name. Someone was saying his name.
“Dæmon?”
He blinked. The meeting room door was open. The person he was here to meet had arrived, waving slightly with a look of mild apology.
The moment was gone.
He stood, nodded, and followed them in.
