I lay awake for a long time that night.
The city hummed below the hotel window the way it always did, low and continuous and completely indifferent to the fact that I was staring at a ceiling with too many thoughts and not enough answers. The question I had been carefully not asking myself had surfaced again, the way it kept doing lately, quiet and patient, slipping through every gap I left unguarded.
What happened to all of us, after?
I didn’t have an answer. I wasn’t sure I was ready for one. So I did what I always did when a problem didn’t have a solution yet. I filed it away, closed my eyes, and went back to work in the morning.
Which was how, three days later, I found myself in a back-to-back restructuring session that ran four hours past when I had promised Ethan we would go to t
