What The Room Already Knows
You already know which of your co-founders is going to leave first. You've known for months, if you're honest, and you've just been quietly gathering the evidence so you don't have to be the one to say it out loud first.
Somewhere in your inbox is an email you've read four times and answered zero. You've told yourself you're being strategic about the timing. You are not being strategic. You are afraid of what happens the moment you press send, and the fear has been wearing strategy as a disguise for longer than you'd like to admit.
There's a version of your marriage where the two of you stopped actually talking sometime around year two and started negotiating instead β who does the pickup, who apologizes first, who's allowed to be tired this week. Negotiation isn't the opposite of love. It isn't love either, though, and some part of both of you has known the difference since roughly the week it started.
You didn't come looking for a prediction about next quarter. You came because some part of you already suspects what's coming, and you'd rather hear it from someone with nothing to gain from softening it for you.
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