Ezoic
Even I wasn’t going to send them back out onto the highway at midnight.
So instead, I said, “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”
Melissa smiled.
Triumphant.
She raised her glass to me. My glass. My wine.
Ezoic
She thought she’d won.
At midnight, I went upstairs.
I closed my bedroom door.
I set my alarm for 4:00 a.m.
Not because I intended to cook breakfast.
Because I’d made a decision.
I lay in bed in the dark.
Listening.
To my father’s baseball game. Then the late news. Then infomercials. He fell asleep on my couch with the TV on.
To Melissa laughing with my mother in the kitchen. Glasses clinking. A third bottle opened.
To the ocean. Underneath all of it. Steady. Like it didn’t care.
Ezoic
I thought about the night I told my father I was starting a company.
Thanksgiving. At their house in Cary, outside Raleigh. I was twenty-five. I’d just quit my job as a software engineer at IBM to start Tidewater with my roommate.
I was so excited. I’d been practicing what I’d say for a week.
