Monday.
I told him Sunday night.
Not during a planned moment. I didn’t sit him down or open the spreadsheet or arrange the conversation the way I’d been rehearsing it. He was doing the dishes and I was at the kitchen table, and I started talking before I’d actually decided to.
Which is probably the only way I was ever going to do it.
Here is what I said, more or less: I want to leave my job. I have an idea for what to do instead. I’ve been building this whole thing in my head for months and not telling you, and I don’t know why it took me this long.
He turned off the water. He dried his hands. He sat down.
I kept going. The renewals consulting, the problem statement, the woman in Texas charging $275 an hour, the spreadsheet that says we have four years of runway if year one is slow. I said I also wanted to write something, I didn’t know what yet, I knew that part was less concrete. I said it anyway because it was true.
When I finished he was quiet. I filled the silence immediately, started saying he could ask anything, I had documents, I had a whole competitive landscape, I could walk him through all of it.
He said: “Leigh, I know.”
Not I know about the idea. Not I know what you’re describing. I know.
I asked what he meant. He said he had been watching me be somewhere else for months. Not lost, not checked out, just somewhere else. He thought about asking but decided it would feel like pressure, and whatever was happening seemed like it needed space, not pressure.
Which is a more generous interpretation than the one I’d been carrying around. The one I’d been carrying around was closer to “he hasn’t noticed.” That one was wrong. I need to sit with that.
I did not cry. I mention this because in every version I rehearsed, I cried, which tells me something about how much performance anxiety I had built up around this conversation. In the actual version I just sat there for a minute, next to this person who had been giving me room without my even knowing I needed it.
Twenty-one years. He knows me. I keep acting surprised by that.
Here is what was different from the script. In the scripted version, Doug asked questions about the plan. Timelines, clients, when exactly. The conversation became a business discussion, which I had prepared for, because I know how to run a business discussion. In the real version he only asked one question.
He said: “Is this what you want? Yes or no.”
I said yes.
He said okay, he had some questions but he was going to hold them. He could see I needed to sit with having said it out loud.
He was right.
I don’t know what his questions are. Zoe’s college applications are in the fall, so the timing is probably one of them. The precise when is another. What I’m telling people at work. All of that is still ahead. Those conversations aren’t the hard one anymore. The hard one was saying it was real and that I needed him in it with me, and I did that.
What I wasn’t prepared for is the way the weight redistributed. I slept last night. Not great sleep, whole sleep. I woke up and the thing I’d been carrying in my head for three months was still there, just in a different configuration. Shared rather than secret.
He said okay and he meant it. I think I believe that.
I just don’t know yet what okay turns into.