Aisha moved through the conference room like someone who had learned to live quietly in the world. She arrived early because she liked to witness things before they began. She liked the way light settled on empty chairs. She liked the small sounds that grew only when people were present. Her notebook was neat, a pen clipped to the cover, a travel mug with cooling chai. Her hair was neither staged nor undone. It hung loose around her shoulders in a fall that softened her face. People often remembered her later for that gentleness, for the way she read a room and looked like she belonged to another kind of silence.

The room smelled of paper, old carpet, and the polite anxiety that gathers on training days. Fluorescent lights hummed. A projector screen waited like a blank eye. Around her, other people arrived with polite statements and practiced small talk. Aisha liked to watch them. She liked to place people into the patterns she had catalogued for years. She believed in systems. She believed that most things about a person could be inferred from the way they tied their shoelaces or chose their seat.