Cassandra followed my gaze to the now-empty staircase and nodded. "Yep, that's him. The colleague I told you about." She sighed dramatically. "As you can see... he's not exactly the social type."
"That's putting it mildly," one of the twins—Mira or Lira—chimed in, twirling a red braid around her finger. "We spent a whole year just to get him to stop hiding every time we walked into the room."
"And another six months before he'd say more than three words at a time," the other twin added, shaking her head.
It's that serious?
I studied the empty staircase, reassessing.
Then, this wasn't just ordinary shyness—it was the kind of deeply ingrained social anxiety that came from either trauma or extreme introversion. The type where eye contact felt like an invasion and casual conversation required mental preparation.
And women, especially assertive and extrovert ones like Cassandra and the twins, would naturally put him on edge—too much intensity, too much expectation.
