Mark came home with a rib brace and the kind of exhaustion that follows adrenaline. The doctors told him to rest for a week and avoid heavy lifting for a month. The word rest landed like an exotic currency in our house. We weren’t set up well to stop. Payroll had to run, Collins expected mobilization on Thursday, and Jonah had his own growing responsibilities. It felt as if the business, which had been a machine we all kept feeding with plans and invoices, had suddenly lost its flywheel.
We did what we had learned to do: triage. Mateo took the city rotation. Jonah stepped up into more of a foreman role with Mateo on call. I signed off on overtime for one evening to cover administrative backlog, rearranged delivery windows, and called Collins to explain—honest, quick, professional. He unde
