The attorney meeting lasted 43 minutes. I had planned for an hour.
She went through the non-solicitation clause quickly. I found that efficient, and then noticed I was reading efficiency as reassurance, which is not quite the same thing. The missing exhibit, the Restricted Clients list referenced in my agreement but not attached to my copy, turns out to work somewhat in my favor: a clause that points to a list it doesn’t include is harder to enforce than it reads on the page. She recommended I request the exhibit from HR anyway. I wrote that down.
The two names I was most worried about: her legal opinion, not legal certainty, is that both contacts fall outside what a court would likely interpret as solicitation under this language, assuming I reach out after I am independently established. Meaning not before I have actually resigned. That was the answer I needed. I also noticed, sitting there with my notepad, that it was the answer I had been quietly hoping for the whole time.
I asked all eight questions and got answers to seven. The ninth I still could not find words for. I am increasingly sure it is not a legal question.
I came home and made a sandwich. This is what I do when I don’t know what to do with something.
I had what I had been waiting for since I pulled that box out of the guest room closet: legal clearance. Not permission. I know the difference. Clearance. And I sat at the kitchen table with half a turkey sandwich and three pages of notes and felt something I had not expected, which was not quite relief. More like: okay. You have what you needed. Now you have to do the thing.
The clearance doesn’t make the phone calls happen. That part is still mine.
I finally wrote Sandra back.
Not immediately. I held her email for 31 hours, which is a long time to sit with three sentences from a stranger who was only kind to me. Every version I drafted in my head was wrong. Too grateful. Too warm. Too quickly trying to help her with her own situation when she hadn’t asked me to. I kept rejecting them.
What I sent was five sentences. Something like: I’m glad it was useful, this is the thing I needed to read and couldn’t find, I hope it keeps being useful. I said I didn’t know how it ends yet. I meant all of it.
What I noticed in the writing of it was something I hadn’t quite located before. When I started this, I thought of it as facing inward. A commitment device. The one person it was for was me, and I was writing in public because that made the commitment harder to dissolve quietly. I was using the internet as an accountability partner because I don’t fully trust myself to hold the line alone.
What I hadn’t thought through was the other direction. Writing Sandra back, I realized the internet had done something else while I wasn’t paying attention. It had made me findable. Not just accountable to myself. Findable to someone I don’t know and will likely never meet, who is sitting in her own version of this, doing her own math, trying to figure out if there’s something on the other side.
That’s different from a commitment device. A commitment device you can dissolve by going quiet. You cannot un-receive the email that has already arrived.
The December emailer still has not written back. Six days. I have moved past telling myself that’s normal and into a specific kind of waiting I am not proud of, which involves checking my inbox, then checking the Sent folder to confirm the email actually went, and then checking the inbox again. I know this is not useful. I am doing it anyway.
The attorney said wait until you’re independent. July at the earliest for the two contingent names. I have the clearance. The backward map. The list of six.
I have not made any calls yet.