The Waiting Room
The conference room smells like dry-erase markers and burnt coffee, the particular scent of every corporate space designed to say nothing about itself. I remember that detail before I remember almost anything else about that Tuesday morning—the fact that the room had no personality at all, and yet it would become the room where my entire professional identity got dismantled in eleven minutes.
I am thirty-one years old, sitting across from Gary Fenwick, my manager of four years, and Patricia from HR, who has brought a manila folder so thick it looks almost apologetic, as if the sheer volume of paperwork might soften what's coming. It doesn't. Nothing softens what's coming.
"Maya," Gary says, and he can't look at me when he says it, which tells me everything before the sentence finishes forming. "This is a really difficult conversation to have."
The fluorescent lights hum overhead—a thin, electric buzz I have never noticed in six years of meetings in this exact room, but now it's the only sound I can register clearly. Everything else arrives muffled, underwater, delayed by half a second, the way sound travels wrong before a storm.
"We've had to make some difficult decisions…
