HOLLY: Yes.
EMILY: Get some sleep. You'll see him tomorrow.
MAYA: I know. I'm smiling at the ceiling again.
LILY: She's a ceiling smiler now.
MADISON: She's gone and I couldn't be happier for her.
MAYA: Goodnight. I love all of you.
CHAPTER 8
Iwake up to an email from my largest ongoing client. It’s a company I’ve worked with for years planning all their business trips.
They're moving to a corporate travel management platform run with artificial intelligence. The contract ends at the end of the year and they won’t be renewing it.
I read it twice. Then I put the phone face-down on the duvet and look at the ceiling and do the math in my head, which I've been doing in the abstract since the business started slowing and now have to do with real numbers. End of year is six weeks away. The contract represented thirty percent of my agency revenue. The content side doesn't cover the gap. Not yet.
Not yet. I hold onto that.
It takes about four minutes for the specific brand of quiet devastation that lives underneath my optimism to show up. Not panic. Worse than panic in some ways, the slow recognition that something I built and loved is contracting, that the version of my career I imagined is not the version that's showing up, that I'm going to have to rebuild something and I don't know exactly from what yet.
I was so happy last night.
I'm allowed to be sad this morning. Both things exist.
I don't text the group chat immediately. I lie with it for a little while, which is something I'm learning to do, to hold the feeling before I deflect it with humor or pivot immediately to action. Anthony told me to slow down in the moment between seeing something and doing it.
I slow down instead of full on panicking and sending an email begging them to reconsider. Instead of sending an email, I text Holly.
MAYA: Bad news this morning, my biggest client is leaving at end of year.
HOLLY: Oh no. Maya. I'm so sorry.
MAYA: I'm okay. I will be okay. Just needed to say it to someone before I figure out what to do about it.
HOLLY: Do you want to talk? Grab some coffee? Brunch?
MAYA: Later maybe. I need to sit with it first.
HOLLY: Okay. I'm here.
HOLLY: Does he know?
MAYA: Not yet.
HOLLY: Tell him when you're ready. Not because you need fixing, just because he'd want to know what’s going on with you.
MAYA: I know he would.
MAYA: That's still strange to know someone cares about what’s going on with me just because he cares.
HOLLY: It gets less strange. It gets really good actually.
Anthony texts at eight-fifteen.
Anthony: Good morning. How did you sleep?
