The words blurred behind unshed tears: restructuring, performance metrics, effective immediately. She packed her awards into a banker’s box, left her passcard at reception, and drove aimlessly until the freeway signs pointed toward the ocean.
Tessa drove six silent hours to reach the windswept Oregon coast, desperate to clear her head after losing both her job and her fiancé in the same bruising week. The pain was still fresh, raw, as though a part of her had been cleaved away, leaving behind only fragments of who she used to be.