The Decision

I didn't sleep that night. I lay awake running numbers in my head, rent, savings, the baby I hadn't told anyone about, the risk of leaving whatever stability I had left for a firm I knew almost nothing about, run by a man whose name meant nothing to me yet.

By six in the morning, exhausted and hollow-eyed, I'd made a decision I couldn't take back.

The firm was called Vantage Consulting Group, and the friend of a friend, a woman named Chidinma who'd once worked with me at my old marketing job, back before Steph and the wedding and all the years I'd spent shrinking myself to fit into his family's expectations, met me for coffee to explain what I was walking into.

"It's not a normal interview," she warned, stirring sugar into her cup without looking at me, her spoon clinking too loudly against the ceramic. "The man running the search, he doesn't do things the normal way. Very particular. Very intense. People either love working for him or they last three weeks."

"Intense how?"

"You'll see." She finally met my eyes, and something careful crossed her face. "Camille Astrid, are you sure about this? You look tired. Thinner than the last time I saw you."

"I'm pregnant," I said, before I could stop myself, the words tumbling out like they'd been waiting for permission.

Her spoon froze mid-stir. "Since when? I thought you and Steph"

"We're divorced. It happened before the papers were signed." I forced my voice to stay even, forced my hands to stay still around my cup. "He doesn't know. And he's not going to know until I decide he gets to."

Chidinma studied me for a long moment, and I braced myself for pity, for questions, for the careful voice people used when they thought you'd broken beyond repair.

Instead, she reached across the table and squeezed my hand, her grip warm and certain. "Then let's get you that job. And let's get you eating something more than coffee while we're at it."

"You're not going to ask me if I'm sure? If I've thought this through? Everyone else has an opinion about what I should be doing right now."

"Would it change your mind if I did?" She raised an eyebrow, already knowing the answer. "You've spent five years asking permission to exist the way you wanted to. I'm not about to start being one more person you have to convince." She pulled a small notebook from her bag and scribbled something across a page before tearing it free. "Here. The address, and the name of the man doing the hiring. He's difficult, Camille Astrid. Brilliant, but difficult. Don't let him rattle you in the first five minutes, because he will try."

I folded the paper into my palm like it was something precious, something I couldn't afford to lose. "Thank you. For not asking me to be smaller about this."

"You've been small enough for one lifetime." She finished her coffee in one long swallow and stood, gathering her coat. "Go be enormous for a while. See how it fits."

I sat alone at the table for a long time after she left, turning the folded paper over in my hands without opening it, as if the address inside might change if I looked at it too soon. Around me, the café carried on the way the world always did, a barista calling out orders, two women laughing over a shared pastry. None of them knew that three tables away, a woman was quietly rebuilding herself out of the wreckage of everything she'd trusted.

The interview was scheduled for the following Thursday, at an address downtown I didn't recognize, a glass tower that hadn't been there the last time I'd paid attention to that part of the city, all steel and reflective windows that threw the sky back at itself. I spent three days preparing. I rehearsed answers in the mirror until they stopped sounding rehearsed. I bought a blazer I couldn't quite afford, the kind that cost more than a week of groceries, because I needed to look like a woman who had never been discarded, never been humiliated, never sat in a parking lot laughing until it turned into something else entirely.

At night, after the rehearsing was done, I lay awake cataloguing every version of the interview that could go wrong. Fear, I was learning, didn't announce itself loudly. It sat quietly at the edge of the bed at three in the morning and waited to be noticed.

The morning of the interview, I stood in front of my closet with my hand resting on the small curve of my stomach, barely visible yet, a secret only I could see in the mirror when the light hit just right and I whispered the same promise I'd made that first night.

Whatever happens in there, you don't flinch. You don't apologize for existing. You walk in like you already belong.

I took the elevator up to the fortieth floor, watching the numbers climb, feeling my pulse climb with them. The receptionist barely looked up. "Mrs. Lee?"

"Just Camille Astrid," I corrected, and the word felt like shedding a skin I no longer wanted, like stepping out of shoes two sizes too small.

"Take a seat. Mr. Zee will see you shortly."

Mr. Zee. Not a name I recognized, which was its own small relief, one less thing tying me to the life I was trying to outrun, one less family name I'd have to hear and flinch at.

I sat in the waiting area, my portfolio clutched in both hands, my heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat and my wrists at once. The office hummed around me with the quiet efficiency of a place that ran on ambition, phones ringing softly, someone's heels clicking briskly down a corridor. Somewhere behind that frosted glass door was a decision that would determine whether I spent the next five years surviving or building something Steph Lee could never take from me, could never touch, could never talk his way into ruining.

The receptionist's phone buzzed. She glanced up, her expression unreadable. "He's ready for you."

I stood. Smoothed my blazer with hands that weren't quite steady. Reminded myself, one last time, that the woman walking through that door was not the one who'd stood among spilled oranges and let a man tell her she was an embarrassment in her own living room.

I reached for the handle.

And from the other side of the frosted glass, I heard a voice low, unhurried, unmistakably used to being obeyed without question, say something to someone else in the room that made my whole body go still.

"Send her in. Let's see if she's as sharp as they say."

My hand froze on the door.

Something about that voice made the hair rise on my arms, not fear, exactly. Recognition of something I couldn't yet name, something that felt less like meeting a stranger and more like a door I'd been walking toward my

whole life without knowing it.

I pushed the door open anyway.