Wednesday. I sent the email.
8:43 in the morning. Subject line was something like “document request” because I could not think of what else to call it. Three sentences: I have an employment agreement that references a Restricted Clients exhibit. I’m planning some career transitions and I’d like a copy for reference. Who should I contact for this?
That was it. Three sentences. Send.
The response came back in an hour and forty minutes. A PDF. Fourteen pages, most of it boilerplate from the original agreement, the actual exhibit at the back: two columns, one heading, a list of account names.
I read it at my desk with my office door closed, even though nobody on my floor has used office doors to signal anything since approximately 2021.
The attorney told me in June that the clause was narrow and the exhibit existed to define scope, not to prohibit everything. She was right. About eight names on the list came from my second list of twenty-three. The rest I can work with freely. The eight I’ll need to think through the timing on, which the attorney and I can sort out before September 19.
It should feel like relief. It does feel like relief, or something close enough that I cannot cleanly distinguish between them. What I noticed sitting there was something slightly different from what I had expected.
I was reading a document that had my situation exactly right. Someone at the company had anticipated that Leigh might leave and had identified the accounts that mattered most to them if she did. That list has been sitting in an HR file this whole time. Before the review. Probably years before I started thinking seriously about any of this.
I don’t know what I expected. Some friction, maybe. Some sense that the request itself would feel like a line I was crossing. What I got was a PDF with my departure already factored in. The company had a plan for this. It just wasn’t mine.
Eleven weeks I carried this. Yesterday I wrote about it in enough detail that I could not pretend it was still fine to wait. This morning I sent three sentences. The exhibit arrived before lunch.
I’ve been doing this in various forms for months now. The attorney intake form: eight minutes of staring, four sentences, submit. The first outreach email: three weeks of drafting, twelve sentences, done. The call to the last name on the list: half a day of preparation, twenty-two minutes, the thing was done.
The doing is always faster than the not-doing. I know this. I know it about myself specifically, in a way that is no longer theoretical, and I still manage to forget it at every stage. There is something genuinely strange about that pattern.
I haven’t sat down yet with the exhibit and my second list to mark who’s on it and who isn’t. I know the rough count, eight names, but I haven’t done the specific comparison. I know which general category each of those eight falls into but I haven’t matched the exhibit to the actual list, name by name, and made the notes I’ll need to make.
I’ll do that this week. Probably tonight. It will take thirty minutes.
The exhibit PDF has been open in a tab for most of today. The note with the twenty-three names is in my phone. I have not yet opened them at the same time.
The gap between having the information and using the information is territory I’ve been in before. I recognize the terrain.
Seventeen days. The exhibit exists now. I still have to sit down with the list.