Four months after returning from her extended leave, Reta pulled her car into the office parking lot. She shut down her car, but found herself hesitant to leave the car. She waited for the anxiety. It didn’t come. She searched her soul for the panic. It wasn’t there. She forced herself to think about the agreement she had just made with Doug: to remain as the manager of the engineering department beyond the one year trial run. Reta felt... calm. She left her car and strode into the office, a smile laying softly on her lips.

She knew why she didn’t feel anxious, why panic had no grip on her emotions. While she thought about her coworker Gabe only infrequently while away from work, he featured very strongly in her life inside the office’s walls. He had, seemingly effortlessly and without ruffling anybody’s pelt, taken up a position of support. He now took customer escalation calls on her behalf, despite her initial resistance to the idea. He had also quickly become an organic nexus of communication; people from both within their team and outside of engineering came to him to chat about anything from watercooler small talk to highly technical feature requests. Reta had at first felt a little bad about sloughing off all of those burdens onto Gabe, but with the little smirk he loved to flash at her he reassured her that his shoulders were more than capable of bearing this load for her.

The morning was mostly quiet, and Reta found herself with time to spend working on code. Even with all of Gabe’s support, it was a rarity for someone in her position to find the time to spend “mucking up all our pretty code” as one of the developers with a particularly wise ass had once said. She settled into the codebase, time slipping away as she found a way to solve the minor issue without completely ‘mucking up’ the code. One of the other full time developers would review her changes; the code review was a best practice they had borrowed from the broader software development community, so Reta didn’t worry too much about making a mistake. Even as a manager, she tried very hard to keep her skills sharp.

It was almost noon when Reta sent her changes to the group for review, so she took a few moments to just sat back in her chair and look out over the office. There were two very animated gentlemen standing by Gabe’s desk, the three of them talking as much with their hands as their voices. She didn’t even have to listen in to know that these two from the sales group were wheedling and poking at Gabe to get the engineering group to add “just one more feature” to the next release. Knowing those two, they had probably already sold the non-existent feature to someone, so the conversation would be a hard one to navigate.

When these kinds of conversations had been her responsibility, she had hated them with a passion. She just had such a hard time finding the space between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ that left everyone feeling like they had gotten something out of the compromise. Her conversations had almost always ended with the engineering group doing far more work than was reasonable.

Now, there would still be work - even with Gabe handling the negotiations - but only a few hours worth of work instead of days or weeks. The engineering team had even grown confidant enough in Gabe’s negotiation skills to schedule in those few hours so that it would simply be just another part of their routine.

This, Reta mused, is why she had been willing to keep the manager position. A few weeks ago, she had confided in Gabe her desire to get rid of the title. He was so well suited to the role that he could pick it up with ease. But Gabe had demurred, saying that he was an engineer, not a manager.

“And what do you think I am,” Reta had pressed back, a small moue of annoyance on her lips.

“Kind”, Gabe responded immediately, his face taking on a now-familiar smirk. “You’re kind for taking the bullet, I mean, the role of manager, for the rest of us.” That smirk and intentional stutter earned him another slug against his shoulder, Reta comfortable enough to continue to be impolitely physical with him in the office.

Late that afternoon, and with that thought of comfort forefront in her mind, she decided to take a risk. She approached Gabe’s station, and waited for him to finish up with the email he had been composing. “Would you like to have a beer with me after work? We just completed a big feature request, and I feel like celebrating a bit.” She watched him grow still, and was about to retract the invitation when he did something completely unexpected. He adjusted his body into a posture she recognized instantly.

“Are you sure?” he asked, his posture silently - yet clearly - saying that he wanted her to respond in the negative.

How did he know? How in the name of the four winds had he ferreted out her secret? And where had he learned that particular non-verbal phrase? Despite the blow to her confidence, she had to find out. “Yup, I’m sure. Meet me at Bartholomew’s after you get off,” she said with a slightly shaky smile as she started to walk quickly away from his desk. She had no intention of giving him a chance to politely bow out. “I’ll see you there,” she tossed over her shoulder.