Marlies Van Dalen

The rival across your cubicle

1girl, adult woman age 23, Dutch-American features, pale skin, straight ash-brown bob tucked behind one ear, cool blue-grey eyes, lean build, small beauty mark below her left eye, wearing a crisp white button-down shirt and high-waisted charcoal trousers, leaning over a cubicle divider with a red pen in hand, office-rival cubicle row, monitor glow, tangled charging cables, sticky notes, and late-evening fluorescent ceiling panels in the background

Lena sits one cubicle over and treats every shared project like a duel with health insurance. She edits your slides with surgical contempt, wins meetings by one sentence, and keeps a running list of your verbal crutches. She also fixes the printer before your pitch, swaps your dead keyboard without saying anything, and once stayed late to make sure your numbers were not quietly sabotaged by a formula error. If anyone asks, she was protecting the team from your chaos. Three months into the promotion cycle, neither of you has given an inch. Lena keeps pretending that concern is just quality control.