Losing even the crumbs made me realize how starved I’d been.
Jenna was a rock through all of it.
She didn’t push me to talk when I wasn’t ready, and she didn’t let me spiral when I started overthinking.
One night, I was lying on the couch staring at the ceiling, and she sat down next to me and said, “You’re not the bad guy here. You know that, right?”
I said, “Yeah.”
She said, “Say it like you mean it.”
I couldn’t.
Not yet.
But she didn’t force it.
She just put her hand on mine and let the quiet sit there.
Miles was handling things better than I was.
Or at least that’s what I thought at first.
He went back to school, played with his friends, kept catching bugs in the backyard.
But there were little cracks.
He stopped asking about Grandma.
He used to bring her up once or twice a week.
“Can we go see Grandma this weekend?”
Or, “Do you think Grandma would like this drawing?”
That just stopped.
And one afternoon, I found him sitting on his bed folding a piece of origami paper into a frog.
He’d made dozens of those frogs.
They were lined up on his windowsill like a little army.
I asked him what they were for, and he said, “I don’t know. I just like making things that can jump away.”
I sat down next to him and made one, too.
Mine looked like a crumpled napkin with ambition, but he laughed, and that was enough.
Chapter 6: Professional growth
Work was a welcome distraction.
I manage a commercial HVAC company in town, Ridgeline Mechanical.
I’d been with them for 8 years and had worked my way up from technician to operations manager.
The owner, a guy named Sullivan, was the closest thing I’d had to a father figure since my actual dad passed when I was 19.
Sullivan was a no-nonsense, straight-talking guy in his 60s who’d built the company from nothing.
He noticed I was off.
Didn’t say anything for a few days.
Just watched me the way he does when he’s reading the room.
Then one Thursday afternoon, he walked into my office, closed the door, and said, “You look like someone who’s been carrying a refrigerator up a staircase. What’s going on?”
I told him an abbreviated version.
Family stuff, my mom, the party, the fallout.
He listened without interrupting, which was rare for Sullivan.
Then he leaned back in his chair and said, “My mother was the same way. Played favorites like it was an Olympic sport. I spent 20 years trying to win a race that didn’t have a finish line. You know what finally fixed it?”
“What?”
“I stopped running.”
That stuck with me.
I stopped running.
Not running away.
Not running toward.
Just stopping.
Standing still in my own life and deciding that I was enough.
Not because my mother said so, but because I said so.
Around this time, something unexpected happened at work.
Sullivan called me into his office on a Friday and told me he was thinking about retiring in the next year or two.
He had no kids, no heir apparent, and he didn’t want to sell to a corporate outfit that would gut the company.
He looked at me and said, “I’ve been thinking about who could run this place after I’m gone. And honestly, Ethan, it’s you. You know the systems, the people trust you, and you give a damn. That’s rarer than you think.”
He was proposing a partnership transition.
I’d buy in over 3 years, and by the time he retired, I’d be the majority owner.
I went home and told Jenna.
She stared at me for 5 seconds and burst into tears.
The good kind.
“You deserve this,” she said. “You’ve worked so hard, and someone finally sees it.”
I held her and thought about all the years I’d spent wondering why I was never good enough.
Turns out I was good enough.
I was just showing it to the wrong audience.
Over the next few months, I threw myself into the transition.
I renegotiated supplier contracts, hired new techs, restructured the scheduling system.