We are not a charity.
We are a business.”
My ears started ringing.
I’d worked at that agency for almost three years.
I had taken late calls, skipped lunches, stayed weekends, saved bad campaigns, soothed angry customers, trained new hires, pulled numbers out of thin air when nobody else could.
I’d been the first one in and the last one out so many times that the cleaning crew knew my daughters’ names.
And now I was being told I should have left a stranger on the side of the road because a pitch mattered more.
“Nick,” I said, and I heard my own voice shake.
“I have given everything to this place.”
He didn’t even blink.
“I don’t care,” he said.
“Clean out your things.
You’re done here.”
I just stood there.
My brain refused to catch up.
A few people looked away.
A few looked at me with something like pity.
One of the account managers shifted in her seat and stared down at her keyboard as if the letters suddenly fascinated her.
Nobody said a word.
Nick nodded toward the hallway.
“That’s the end of it.”
I wish I could say I walked out with dignity.
I wish I could say I gave him some speech about loyalty and humanity and how one day he’d regret it.
What actually happened was uglier than that.
My face got hot.
My throat closed.
And before I could stop it, tears stung my eyes.
I turned away so fast I nearly dropped my bag.
I heard a chair scrape behind me, then nothing but the pounding of my own footsteps as I left the office I had poured myself into and walked straight into the bright morning sun like a man getting shoved out of his own life.
The second I got inside my car, I locked the doors.
Then I gripped the steering wheel and screamed.
Not words—just raw, broken sound.
And I had no idea that the woman I’d stopped for was about to come looking for me.
The steering wheel of my seven-year-old Honda Accord bore the rhythmic indentations of my knuckles.
The vinyl was cold, cracked along the top seam where the high-altitude sun of suburban Denver had baked it for half a decade.
When the scream finally tore itself out of my chest, it didn’t feel like sound; it felt like jagged, unrefined gravel being dragged up through my esophagus.
