Not that I ‘let myself go.’
The truth.
That you left the woman who built your company for a thirty-one-year-old in the accounting department.
You don’t get to keep being the hero of a story you didn’t write, Gerald.
That’s my whole price. Dignity. In writing and out loud.”
He stared at me like he’d never seen me before.
Maybe he hadn’t.
Maybe he’d spent twenty-seven years looking at the woman who cooked the pot roast and never once seen the one who wrote the engine.
“You’ve changed,” he said, and he meant it as an insult.
“No,” I said. “I remembered.”
PART 4
The company announcement went out six weeks later.
I did not need to be there for it.
But Meridian Systems had an annual client gala every fall — three hundred people, the whole industry, glass ballroom downtown — and this year, as part of our agreement, I was invited.
