Until this email.

Outside, the sky is doing that thing it does in early November—gray and gold and aching with the memory of October. My hands are steady.

The subject line lands in my inbox like a stone dropped into still water:

There’s a second photograph. Kharlie again, same jacket, same defiant tilt of her chin, but this time she’s holding a handwritten sign:

No salutation. No company signature. Just a string of words that feels like a key to a door I’m not sure I want to open.

The date in the subject line is January 11, 2016.

I know that date. Not because anything famous happened, but because that was the day I almost quit. The day my own hands shook so badly I couldn’t hold a coffee cup straight. The day I sat in my car in a parking lot and watched rain erase the world through the windshield, thinking: What’s the point of trying to save anyone when you can’t even save yourself?

I scroll down.

I hit send before I can talk myself out of it.