I went home eventually, the way you do, and the apartment was worse than the street, because the apartment was where the silence lived. I came in and did not turn on the lights. I stood in the dark kitchen, white cabinets, black counters, the one white mug in the drying rack, and I did not eat, though it was long past dark, because eating was a thing I did standing up while reading, and there was nothing left to read that mattered, and so the whole apparatus of feeding myself simply declined to start.
I sat down on the floor. I remember this precisely. I, who had negotiated against men who owned islands, sat down on the floor of my own kitchen in my coat and put my back against the cabinet and did not cry, because I did not know how anymore. I had traded that too. Instead I did the thing that was so much worse than crying. I opened my laptop, there on the floor, and I began to model scenarios.
Down markets. Alternate buyers. A recapitalization. I sat on the floor of my dark apartment at eleven at night and built a spreadsheet against my own drowning, because it was the only motion I had, and the numbers gave back nothing, and I built them anyway, deep into the night, the blue light on my face, a woman bailing a boat that had already sunk, unable to understand that the water was not the emergency.
The bailing was the emergency. The bailing had been the emergency for eleven years.