So, yeah, big wrench thrown into the plot, the narrative purpose of this is to bump the stakes of later events up a bit.
There's a rule of threes applied to the scene that carries on from the previous page: every time we see Pat from Miles' point of view at an increasingly lower angle, starting from the panel with Miles coming into the office, followed by seeing Pat at eye level, and now seeing him from the height of his desk below eye level (which says a lot considering he's proportioned as a fairly short guy), to emphasize Miles' mood and confidence dropping.
And of course there's the three panels in the middle row of this page showing Miles' reaction, the lines separating the rows in uneven angles to show imbalance. I wasn't sure how to handle this, if the diagonal lines converging to the right of the page would be a better fit (making Miles look as if the lines are closing in on him), or converging on the left (giving more room for a closeup), but I went with the latter. There's also of course a palette shift until we end in black and white halftones at the last panel.