He leaned against the counter, watching me with that unnerving attention of his. “You don’t live like that anymore.”
“No,” I said. “Now I make spreadsheets.”
He laughed, and the sound loosened something in the room.
A few months later Northline opened a Seattle office. The city had been on our radar for expansion anyway, and I took the opportunity partly for business, partly because distance can be a kind of medicine. Seattle’s gray mornings felt different from Denver’s winter light. Softer. Less accusatory. The air near Elliott Bay carried salt and damp and the possibility of reinvention. We found an office with windows that looked over water and ferry lines, and I signed the lease with the kind of steady hand that comes only after you have signed far more painful things in your mind.