When the redundancy letter arrived, Maya read it three times and then put it face-down on the desk. She finished her coffee. She answered two more emails. She went to the team meeting and participated. She told no one. On the way home she listened to a podcast about something entirely unrelated. She cooked dinner. She watched forty minutes of television without seeing any of it. She went to bed and lay very still in the dark. She was not unaffected — she was simply very good at containing things. She had been bottling up difficult feelings since she was a child, and she was, by any measure, excellent at it. The question she had never fully asked was: where did it all go?

The next morning, Maya called her best friend. She had planned to say: I just wanted to let you know about some news. What came instead, before she had finished the first sentence, was crying — unexpected, uncontrolled, and enormous. She cried for several minutes while her friend held the line. She said she was sorry. Her friend said don't be. Maya talked for an hour — about the job, about the years she had put in, about the fear of what came next. When she hung up, she felt hollowed out and lighter at the same time. She had spent so many years perfecting the art of containment that she had forgotten how necessary it was, occasionally, to simply let it all out.