This is the thing I’ve thought about most, in the months since: the moment where you could have insisted on something and didn’t, because you’d been trained by eighteen years of family company dynamics to not insist. To support. To smooth.
I didn’t know, at that point, that the conference room meeting was coming in four weeks. I knew it in a different way — the way you know something when all the evidence is there and you choose to believe the more comfortable interpretation.
Four weeks later, Victor closed the door.
Handover, Departure, and the First Practical Shock
The four-week notice period was the strangest professional month of my life.
I have never, before or since, tried to do two things simultaneously that were each other’s opposites: hand my work to someone and leave that work behind. The first requires presence and care. The second requires detachment. I went back and forth between them sometimes within the same hour.
I wrote the handover document. It took me most of the first week of notice, because I was trying to do it right — not as a gesture of loyalty to the company that had just dismissed me, but because our carriers and clients were people I’d worked with for years and they deserved continuity. Also because incomplete handovers become the problem of whoever inherits them, and I did not want Jana, who had been with us for five years and knew her job well, to spend six months explaining things that I could have documented in a week.