Madison’s World Redux Season 3 Episode 13

Greg took matters into his own hands. 

Across Madison’s desk, near the back corner by her monitor, a power cord hung in a long dark line toward the floor. He had noticed it countless times before, the cable dropping down from the desk to the power strip below like a route he was not supposed to think about too hard. But he had thought about it. Quietly. Repeatedly. He had marked it in his mind and kept returning to it whenever he was left on the desk too long. 

A possibility. 

A risk. 

An emergency option. 

Now, he decided, it was time to use it. 

This wasn’t really about LLS. Not entirely. He was hurt, yes. Hurt that Madison had chosen that of all things to watch without him. Hurt by the pettiness of it, by how precisely she had found a way to make her point. But even that only sharpened something he had already known. 

He needed to get to McKenzie. 

Not later. Not through Madison. Not as a favor passed down when Madison felt like granting access. He needed to hear things from McKenzie herself. Needed to talk to her directly, without Madison standing between them and translating every request into proof of her own authority. Whatever this future was going to be, whatever shape his life was being pushed toward, he needed to hear it from McKenzie’s mouth. 

Greg crossed the desk as quickly as he dared. 

The power cord was thick and black, with a faint rubber smell and a little give to it when he grabbed hold. Up close it seemed less like a cable and more like a heavy climbing rope, smooth in places, dusty in others, curving down over the edge of the desk and disappearing toward the floor below. 

He wrapped both arms around it first, then his legs, testing the weight. 

It held. 

For one brief second he paused, looking down. 

The floor was much farther away than he wanted it to be. 

From Madison’s perspective it would have been nothing, barely a drop at all. From his, it looked like a dangerous descent through open air, the desk edge suddenly becoming the lip of something steep and unforgiving. The power strip below sat against the baseboard like a destination he could see clearly and still not quite trust himself to reach. 

Greg tightened his grip and began to slide. 

Slowly. 

Very slowly. 

He was careful not to let himself slip too fast. He could have moved quicker, maybe, but speed meant risk, and he was not trying to break a leg—or worse—before he ever made it to the floor. So he inched his way down, stopping every few moments to readjust his grip, the rubber of the cord dragging against his palms and the inside of his arms. 

His shoes scraped lightly against the cable. 

His shoulders strained. 

The farther he moved from the desk surface, the more exposed he felt. 

Above him, Madison’s desktop stretched wider and wider into something almost absurd in scale. Her phone still gleamed where he had polished it, now seeming impossibly far away already. The monitor rose beside him like a dark glass wall. Her keyboard sat back from the edge in neat, oversized rows, each key bigger than a stepping stone. A makeup brush lying near the base of the screen looked like a broom abandoned by something much larger than him. 

And below, the room expanded. 

Every inch downward drove home the same humiliating truth: this was Madison’s world now, and he was moving through it at a scale meant not for belonging, but for management. Her desk was not furniture. It was terrain. Her cords were climbing lines. The drop to her carpet felt like a descent from one level of the world to another. 

Greg kept going. 

Hand down, then foot. Grip, slide, stop. Grip, slide, stop. 

The cable swayed faintly with each shift of his weight, just enough to keep his stomach tight. Once his hand slipped a fraction and his whole body jerked sharply downward before he caught himself again, chest slamming against the cord hard enough to knock the breath from him. 

He froze. 

Waited. 

Then forced himself to keep moving. 

Below him the floorboards and carpet edge grew closer, their textures resolving into real surfaces instead of distant shapes. The power strip came into focus too, plugged full of Madison’s life: monitor, ring light, charger, whatever else she needed to keep her room running the way she liked it. 

Everything in the room seemed bigger now than it had from above. 

Not just physically bigger. 

More dominant. 

More certain of its scale and its purpose. 

Every inch of descent brought home, with fresh clarity, just how small Greg was compared to the life Madison had built around him. Compared to the spaces she moved through effortlessly. Compared to the room that held him, the house that no longer answered to him, the world that had gone on reorganizing itself without once asking whether he could bear the shape of it. 

By the time his feet finally brushed the floor, Greg’s arms were shaking. 

But he was down. 
 
 

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