Luke said, “We can work out the transition details.”
I asked if there was a notice period.
Victor said four weeks, paid, which was something. He said there was severance, three months, which was also something. He said we could make the transition professional and clean.
What he did not say, and what I would not understand until later, was that he’d told Luke I “mostly handled the administrative side.” The phrase came to me secondhand, from our operations coordinator Jana, who heard it in passing and repeated it three weeks after I left, with the careful apology of someone who knows the sentence will land somewhere sensitive.
Mostly handled the administrative side.
Eighteen years. Two hundred and forty-some carrier relationships, built one call and one delivered shipment at a time. Twelve exception protocols I’d written by hand because the industry had no template. The Alder Home Supply account, which represented roughly thirty percent of Morgan Freight Coordination’s annual revenue, which I had managed, personally, since the third year they were our client.
Administrative side.
I drove home with my hands steady on the wheel and my chest doing something I couldn’t name and didn’t have words for yet. I sat in my car in the driveway of my apartment for six minutes. I know it was six minutes because I watched the clock on the dashboard.
Then I went inside and did not cry, because I was forty-two years old and I had too many things to figure out to start with crying.