On a snowy upstate New York night, I left my resume on the counter of a 24/7 diner. Three hours later, a private number called.
“Does this résumé belong to you?”
At midnight, a helicopter blade ripped through the snow outside my motel window. A man stepped out, claiming to be the grandfather I never knew. He said, “Tonight, we take back everything they stole from you. We start with the name they use to hold you down.”
My name is Zoe Foster. Three days ago, I was a senior risk analyst at HelioQuari Brands. Tonight, I was just a woman in a cheap motel room staring at a snowstorm, wondering how my life had unspooled so quickly. The drive from Boston had been a surrender. I’d left the city limits just as the first serious snow began to stick, pushing my sedan north toward the blurred line of the Adirondacks. Riverforge was a town you went to when you wanted the grid to forget you. It was pine trees, mountains, and weak cell service. After the last three months at HelioQuari—a sprint of acquisitions and regulatory deadlines that had bled into ninety-hour weeks—I needed the silence. I needed the anesthesia of the cold. My body was still vibrating with the phantom hum of the office. The burnout was more than just fatigue; it was an erosion. I felt thin, stretched, transparent. My relationships, my apartment, my health—I had fed all of it into the corporate grinder, and I had nothing left to show for it but a dull ache behind my eyes and a paycheck that barely covered the cost of existing in Boston.
The diner appeared through the curtain of snow around 10:00 p.m., a low flat building buzzing with neon advertising “OPEN 24/7.” It was the only sign of life for miles. I needed coffee. I needed a moment to think that was not my car and not yet a motel. I took the resume with me. It felt stupid carrying a CV into a roadside diner, but it was the only solid thing I had left. It was three pages of proof that I existed, that I was competent. I had spent the last week polishing it, tweaking the kerning, agonizing over verb choice. It was my lifeboat.
I slid into a cracked vinyl booth. The diner smelled of old coffee and frying oil. A young waiter, Noah, maybe twenty, nodded at me and poured a cup of dark liquid without asking.
“Just coffee?” he asked.
“Just coffee, and a quiet corner,” I said.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
