The questions came Wednesday night, which was not when I expected them.
I had been anticipating a kitchen-table conversation. Serious. Probably after Zoe went upstairs. Doug would have a list, I would have answers, we would work through them the way two people who’ve been married for 21 years work through things: methodically, a little formally, with the television off.
Instead he asked the first one in the car. We were coming back from dropping Max at a friend’s house, 8:47pm, and he said, without preamble, “So what’s the actual timeline?”
Not “Are you sure?” Not “Have you thought about Zoe?” He went straight to the logistics. That is either very Doug or very generous of him. Possibly both.
I told him about the backward map. All of it. September 19 for notice. July for first client conversations. LLC before that. I said it like I’d said it to myself a dozen times, and it came out clean because it was.
He didn’t say anything for a minute. We were stopped at a light.
“November 14?” he asked.
Not November. November 14. He has known me for 22 years and my birthday is not something he forgets.
I said yes.
I had been holding that date for months, in spreadsheets and documents and in this blog, and then I said it out loud to Doug in the car coming back from Max’s friend’s house on a Wednesday night and it became something different. Not more real. Just real in a new dimension.
He said, “That’s seven months.”
I said I know.
He asked the question I had prepared for and also dreaded: “What about Zoe?”
Here’s what I said: the college application window is actually why September 19 is the right date, not the wrong one. If I leave before October, Zoe’s applications happen while I’m free to help her, not while I’m managing Q4 for someone else. I had this answer. I had workshopped it. It came out right.
What I didn’t have an answer for was what Doug asked next.
He didn’t ask what I thought he would ask. He didn’t ask about health insurance, which I’ve done two hours of research on. He didn’t ask what happens if I don’t have a client by September. He asked: “How do you want me to talk about this? When people ask me what Leigh’s up to?”
I didn’t have anything for that.
Twenty-four years in corporate. Four case studies. A competitive landscape document. A backward-mapped timeline. I have been so focused on the internal story, the one I’m telling myself about leaving, that I hadn’t thought about the external one. The one Doug will have to tell at his work Christmas party. The one I’ll have to tell my mother at some point. The version of this that exists in other people’s conversations.
I said something like: just say I’m consulting. Client retention. He nodded. Fine.
But I’m still thinking about why that question landed differently than all the ones I prepared for. Something about it felt more real than the timeline, which is saying something given that the timeline is now in months with deliverables attached.
I think it’s this: I have been managing my own narrative carefully for the last three months. On this blog, in my head, in the documents I keep updating. And I had forgotten that narratives go places you don’t send them. They travel. They arrive in conversations you’re not part of. They come back to you changed.
Doug is going to tell someone about this. Probably soon. That person is going to have an opinion.
I don’t know if I’m ready for that. I’m not sure it matters whether I’m ready.