Terminated for attending my mother’s funeral.” After five years of loyalty, I was fired by email while still grieving.

but do not want to become part of it. I felt eyes on my back as I placed the framed photo of Mom into a cardboard box. In the picture, she was smiling in her blue cardigan, standing on the porch of the house she had spent forty years fighting to keep.

Greg appeared beside my cubicle with both hands in his pockets.

He was forty-eight, polished, soft around continue reading …