The Dare
The moment he leaned back and wore that little smirk, I knew what he was about to say.
“If you’ve got a problem,” he said, fingers laced behind his head like he’d just won a prize, “walk out.”
My manager—no, that boy—tossed it off like a used napkin. Twenty years of service turned into a dare.
I sat staring at him. Twenty years.
Late nights.
Missed dinners. Emergency deployments. Duct-tape fixes only I understood.
My name wasn’t on the website, or the press releases, or the investor decks, or even the patents. But my fingerprints were everywhere—code, servers, the systems that made Lxora Systems hum like the patched-together creature I’d built.
And this confident MBA with perfect hair and a heavy cologne habit thought he could treat me like overhead.
“You’ve been here too long, Lisa,” he said, flipping through my review like it was a diner menu. “We need people who are agile, adaptable.
You know—innovative.”
He even did the air quotes.
I didn’t rage.
I didn’t argue.
Something colder settled in—bone-deep quiet, the way an old machine stills right before a surge.
I thought about birthdays I’d missed.
Weekends when my daughter’s laughter was a voicemail because I was trapped in the server room. Anniversary dinners canceled because “the system went down.”
I had given it everything.
And there I was—told to take a door.
So I did.
The Walk
No scene.
No tears. I closed my laptop, slid it into my bag, and stood.
The silence in the office felt heavy—like gravity carrying respect, loyalty, history.
I walked past my team—the engineers I’d mentored and defended when management wanted shortcuts.
Past HR.
Past glass-walled rooms full of people pretending not to look.
No one said a word.
No one dared.
Silence has weight. That day, it pressed on everything.
I didn’t go home.
The Diner
I ended up at the diner down the street—the one with cracked red vinyl booths.
The waitress didn’t need to ask.
She set a black coffee in front of me, refilled it before it was empty, and left me alone.
I sat for almost an hour. No crying.
No anger.
No shaking hands. Just quiet.
The coffee was bitter and perfect.
Lxora had been my life.
I joined when it was a handful of idealists over a pawn shop.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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