12/03/2025
On the morning Ethan Carter lost his job, the sky over downtown looked like photocopy paper—flat, colorless, ready to take bad news.
The conference room had a too-clean table and a bowl of untouched mints. The HR manager’s voice was careful; the director’s eyes kept sliding to his watch. A folder with Ethan’s name on it waited between them.
Twenty-two years. Gone in twenty minutes.
They said all the usual things.
It’s not about performance. The market has shifted. We’re offering a severance. We’re so grateful for your loyalty.
His mouth produced the usual replies.
Of course. I understand. Thank you.
Someone slid a cardboard box across the table, as if this were a movie and not his actual life. Into it went his desk in miniature: the photo of Heather and Emma at the lake, the chipped mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST BOSS, a couple of pens that actually worked.
The security guard he knew by name walked him to the elevator, talking about last night’s game. On the ground floor, the guard clapped him on the shoulder the way men do when they don’t know what else to do.
Outside, the air smelled of exhaust and wet pavement. Ethan put the box on the passenger seat of his car and sat behind the wheel with his hands at ten and two and no idea where to go.
His phone buzzed.
A text from Heather.
How’s your morning? Don’t forget we meet Emma’s counselor at 7. Love you.
He could type three words—“I got fired”—and let them detonate between them.
Instead, his thumbs moved on muscle memory.
Busy day. Call you later. Love you too.
The lie was small and neat. It still scraped on the way out.
He turned the key, pulled out of the garage, and, at the first light, did not turn right toward downtown, the way he had every workday for half his adult life.
He kept going.
Highway swallowed city. Office towers became warehouses, then car lots, then the bland nowhere beyond.
He drove with the radio off, the silence loud, the cardboard box beside him like a passenger. The clock on the dashboard meant nothing.
The green sign rose on the right before he’d decided anything.
EXIT 42 – SERVICE AREA – GAS • FOOD • RESTROOMS.
He flicked on his blinker as if someone else had moved his hand.
The Exit 42 service plaza sat in a low dip of land between two interstates, an island of concrete and neon surrounded by rivers of traffic. Trucks idled nose to tail; cars slid in, disgorged passengers with stiff legs and paper cups, and slid out again.
He parked at the far edge, under a flickering lamppost, and turned off the engine.
From here he could watch the whole choreography. The constant arrivals and departures. The woman in the floral blouse pushing a rack of souvenirs. The trucker climbing down from a tall cab, rolling his shoulders. The girl in the oversized hoodie dragging a dog toward the scrap of half-dead grass.
All of them going somewhere.
He had nowhere.
He went into the plaza, bought a coffee he barely tasted, and sat by the window with his laptop open, résumé on the screen, cursor blinking in the middle of the word “experienced” as if mocking him.
He stared at it until the coffee went cold.
He did not go home until five-thirty, when his usual commute would have brought him through the door. On the way, he stopped at a grocery store, bought milk, and practiced lies in his head.
“How was your day?” Heather asked as he stepped into the kitchen and kissed her cheek.
“Same old,” he said. “Meetings.”
The next morning, he put on a shirt and tie, picked up his empty briefcase, kissed his wife, and told her he was going to work.
He drove to Exit 42.
By the end of the first week, he had a routine.
Leave at the same time. Merge onto the highway. Pass the exit that led to the glass building that no longer wanted him. Take Exit 42 instead.
Park under the same lamppost. Carry his laptop inside. Claim a table near an outlet with a view of the lot. Open job sites and pretend that “motivated self-starter” still meant something at forty-eight.
He divided his day into blocks the way he had once divided his calendar.
Morning: search, tweak, apply. Lunch: something cheap, eaten without tasting. Afternoon: more searching, more tweaking, longer stretches of staring at nothing while trucks came and went.
His new coworkers were the people who drifted through Exit 42.
The trucker with the gray mustache and battered cap that said JIM. He always parked three rows over, always raised his thermos in a small salute when he passed Ethan’s windshield.
The widow who ran the gift shop. Her badge said MARGO; her blouses were all variations of the same floral print. She restocked shelves with the brisk efficiency of someone who had once run a real store and now sold plastic state magnets to people who would forget this stop by the next one.
The girl in the ill-fitting blazer over a band T-shirt, hair dyed a shade of purple that dared anyone to comment. One morning he watched her sit on the curb, phone to her ear, shoulders shaking. Later, he watched her drop her corporate lanyard into the trash and ask for an application at the plaza café.
He spoke to them in fragments—comments about the weather, complaints about the coffee, a muttered “rough day?” that needed no answer.
He never said, “I lost my job.” He never said, “I’m hiding.” He told Margo he was “between things.” He told himself this was temporary.
At home, the mask held. Mostly.
He came through the door at six with the same tired slump, the same stale shirt, the same kiss on Heather’s cheek.
He asked Emma about her homework. He nodded while she talked about majors and campuses, her eyes bright when she described a college three states away.
He stared at the tuition numbers circled in the margins and did silent math until his chest hurt.
He lay awake beside Heather, listening to the furnace kick on, counting down the months until severance ran out and savings began to bleed.
He told himself he would tell her when he had good news to pair with the bad. When he could present the problem and the solution together, like a neat slide deck.
Days kept passing. Solutions did not appear.
The arguments began as sparks.
He snapped at Emma for leaving her backpack in the hall. The way she recoiled lodged in his throat.
He complained about the way Heather loaded the dishwasher. She watched him over the open door, eyes tired.
“You’re on edge,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” he said too fast. “I’m just tired.”
She let it go. For the moment.
She started watching him the way people watch a storm on the horizon—measuring, waiting.
The crack widened on a Wednesday night, over the soft slap of mail on the dining table.
Heather sat under the pendant light, sorting envelopes. Ethan came in from the garage, the smell of fryer grease and cheap coffee clinging to his jacket.
“There are a lot of charges here from that plaza off Exit 42,” she said. “You’ve been there almost every day.”
His heart stuttered.
“It’s just a coffee stop,” he said. “Traffic’s a nightmare.”
“Three times in one afternoon?” she asked.
He had no answer that didn’t sound like what it was.
She didn’t push the point. Instead she opened the sideboard drawer, the catch-all for spare keys and old manuals, and took out an envelope he recognized instantly.
His name on the front. His former company’s logo in the corner.
“I found this,” she said. “Weeks ago.”
She laid it on the table between them.
“I opened it,” she added. “I know I shouldn’t have. I did.”
The severance letter lay there like an X-ray.
“I’ve been waiting for you to tell me what it says,” she went on, voice low. “Instead, you get dressed every morning, drive away, and spend the day at a gas station.”
She drew in a breath that sounded like it hurt.
“For a while,” she said, “I thought you were cheating on me. The secrecy, the lies about where you are, the extra coffee. I pictured some woman at Exit 42.”
He flinched.
“It’s not that,” he managed. “It’s never been that.”
“I know,” she said. “I know where you’ve been. I know what happened at work. What I don’t understand is why you decided I didn’t get to know. Why you chose to go through it alone and leave me guessing in the dark.”
Her eyes shone, but her voice stayed level.
“We have a mortgage,” she said. “We have a seventeen-year-old who thinks the scariest thing in her life is a college rejection. We have twenty-three years together. And my husband has been living at a highway exit like a ghost.”
The room felt smaller, the air heavier.
He opened his mouth, but the old lines—“I was protecting you,” “I needed time”—crumbled before they reached his tongue.
For weeks, Exit 42 had been his waiting room, his suspended space between what was and whatever came next. A place where nobody expected anything from him beyond moving his car when the plow came through.
Standing in his own dining room, with the severance letter between them and his wife looking at him like a stranger, he finally understood the cost of that suspension.
He hadn’t just been hiding off the highway.
He’d turned his whole life into a rest stop, left everyone he loved idling with their blinkers on, waiting for him to decide whether he was coming back.
And now there was nowhere left to pretend he hadn’t already taken the wrong exit.
To be continued... 👇👇👇
