Chapter 7: Interim Life
Suspension is a strange country. Daniel still had a title on letterhead that no longer opened the same doors. I still had a majority vote that opened doors I had spent a decade pretending I did not hold.
The interim COO scheduled weekly updates. I attended by video, bandage less visible as dressings shrank, questions focused on pipeline and covenant compliance and the forensic timeline. A partner who had once asked me only for more ice at a party asked me now for my reading of a refinancing clause. I gave it. The shift in the room’s gravity was quiet and permanent. People adjust to power the way plants adjust to light. They do not always apologize to the person who moved the lamp.
My personal days acquired a shape: clinic, counsel, work packets, sleep. Friends from before Mercer—two women who had known me when my name on a lease was the most complicated structure I managed—came to the new place with takeout and did not ask me to perform resilience. One of them cried when she saw the healing grid on my palm. I let her. Then we ate noodles and watched something stupid on television. Stupidity without danger was medicinal.
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Evelyn succeeded in placing one item in a local gossip blog: a paragraph about marital strife and a company in transition, no medical details, plenty of implication. Marcus sent a short notice regarding reputation and the ongoing investigation. The paragraph lost its extension in follow-up posts. I did not read the comments. I read the burn clinic’s instructions on scar massage and followed them until my eyes watered.
Daniel’s salary continuation during suspension became a negotiation. I instructed Marcus to allow what the agreement required and not a dollar of narrative more. Charity had been my old habit. The grate had cauterized the habit in a way therapy was still helping me name. The therapist, a woman with a calm voice and a plant that needed water, called the barbecue a “sharpening event.” I disliked the phrase and accepted the truth inside it. Some events do not merely injure. They finish an argument the body has been having with the mind for years.
