It is July 4. I checked the inbox at 7:08 and found the same nothing, which is now nineteen days in one column and eleven in the other. I have stopped treating those numbers like a suspense plot. They are what they are.
The house was still until about ten, then gradually became the kind of July 4 it always is. Max playing something loud upstairs. Zoe appearing at the kitchen counter with a yogurt, asking what we were doing today in the tone of someone who already knows and is merely filing the information for later. Doug in the garage by eight with some project he has been meaning to get to for three weekends. We do not really interrogate each other’s holiday projects. It is a system.
By afternoon, the grill had happened. Doug manages the grill the way he manages anything that requires sustained attention without visible stakes: very well, with a calm I find both enviable and, occasionally, mildly annoying. That last part probably says more about me than him.
I had told myself, somewhere in yesterday’s post, that maybe this weekend I would finally ask about the follow-up questions. The nod I have been watching for six weeks. The three questions I had been imagining on his behalf.
We were outside afterward, just the two of us for a few minutes before the kids drifted back. Some neighbors had started with fireworks that were technically premature but no one was going to say anything. I had a glass of something cold. I said: I know you have follow-up questions. You’ve had that nod for about six weeks and I want to know what’s behind it.
He looked at me for a second. Then he said: “I have one question, actually.”
I said: just one?
He said: “I was waiting to see if you’d figure out the answer before I asked.”
I had prepared, loosely, for three questions. Something about the finances, even though we have already talked about the finances. Something about the timeline, or Zoe’s tuition, or how you find clients when you no longer have a job title doing part of the work for you. Those were the questions I had built in my head.
His one question: “Do you know yet if this is about leaving that job, or about something else?”
I said: what do you mean something else?
He said: “I’ve been reading. Not every post, but enough. And I can’t tell if you’re trying to get out of something or toward something. I’m not sure you can tell yet either.”
I did not have a quick answer. I started talking about the consulting, the renewals work, the document I have been writing and will not name. He let me say all of it. Then he said: “That’s not quite what I mean.”
I know it is not quite what he meant.
I have been thinking about November 14 as an exit. I have been doing the math on the runway, on what three retainer agreements would look like, on the names and the follow-ups and the backward map from September 19. I have been building a case for a destination. And I have also, separately, been building something I cannot fully explain, and I have been running those two tracks in parallel without asking myself whether they are the same thing or two different things going in roughly the same direction.
He was asking me which one I was actually doing.
I told him I thought it was both. That I needed to get out of something specific and I was also trying to figure out what was next, and that I was not sure those two things could be separated cleanly. He nodded in a different way than the nod I had been watching. I do not know what that one means yet.
The fireworks in our general direction got more organized. Max came outside and stood with us for about four minutes before losing interest and going back in. Zoe came out a little later, stood next to Doug, asked what we were talking about. He said “the usual.” She looked at me once in a way I could not fully read and went back in.
He had one question. I had imagined three and I was wrong. I had imagined the question would be about money or timing and it was neither.
I have been asking myself a version of his question for seventy days, in a roundabout way, without quite asking it directly. He asked it directly in one sentence.
Nineteen days and eleven days. July has twenty-five days left.
His question is still sitting with me. Is this about leaving something, or toward something? I said both. He did not seem surprised by that, which I am still thinking about. I cannot tell if “both” is the real answer or the answer that lets me avoid choosing. Maybe that is the follow-up question he decided not to ask. Maybe he is waiting to see if I figure it out myself.
He said he only had one. He did not say he was done.