Nora had been thinking about it since March. By June she'd drafted four versions of the email, each one shorter than the last. The first ran to three paragraphs—what the company had meant to her, what she'd learned, the colleagues who'd shaped her thinking. She read it back and it sounded like an obituary.
The second version cut the sentiment but kept the reasons. She was leaving for a smaller firm. She wanted to do different work. She was ready. That one sounded like a job interview answer, which was worse.
The third was two sentences. I'm resigning, effective August 1st. It's been a good eleven years. She stared at it for a week. The word "good" did too much work. Those years had been fine. Some of them had been excellent. A few had been genuinely bad. "Good" averaged it all into something nobody would argue with or remember.
She deleted the second sentence.
I'm resigning, effective August 1st.
She sent it on a Tuesday morning, between her first coffee and her second. No preamble, no signature block beyond her name. Cheryl from HR called within the hour to ask if everything was all right.
"Everything's fine," Nora said. "I just don't have more to say about it."
There was a pause on the line where Cheryl was deciding whether this was passive-aggressive. Nora could hear her clicking something—pulling up the template for the exit interview, probably. The pause resolved into a careful tone.
"We like to give people space to share their experience," Cheryl said.
"I appreciate that."
Another pause.
"Would you like to schedule a conversation? Sometimes it helps to have a structured—"
"I'm okay. Thank you, Cheryl."
Her closest colleague, Dev, didn't call. He walked to her desk after lunch with two coffees and set one down without asking if she wanted it.
"August first," he said.
"August first."
He sat in the chair he'd been sitting in for nine of her eleven years. He didn't ask why, or what was next, or whether she was sure. He just drank his coffee and looked at the window where the parking lot was.
"You know what I liked about working with you?" he said.
"Don't."
He smiled. "I wasn't going to be sentimental. I was going to say you never explained yourself when you didn't have to."
She picked up the coffee. It was exactly how she drank it.
"One sentence," he said. "I saw it in Cheryl's face."
"One sentence."
"She'll put it in your file."
"I know."
The August light through the window made the parking lot look like something in a photograph—flat and particular, every car distinct. She'd been looking at that parking lot for eleven years and had never once thought about it. Now she noticed the way the painted lines didn't quite reach the curb. Someone had stopped each stripe a foot short, and no one had ever gone back to finish them.
She drank her coffee. Dev drank his.
Neither of them said goodbye on her last day. She packed a box, he nodded from his desk, she nodded back. Outside, the parking lot stripes still didn't reach the curb, and the sky was the same flat white it had been all summer.
She drove home on a route she'd taken two thousand times and noticed nothing she hadn't seen before, which was itself the thing she noticed.