The confirmation window disappears. No alerts, no errors, just silence.
My heart pounds as I watch the system status dashboard. Green lights across the board. The deployment’s rolling out to each hotel, one by one. London. Edinburgh. Manchester. Each location flicks to green.
I run a test booking and create a fake reservation for the London property. It works. The system assigns the room, calculates the rate, sends the confirmation email. Everything exactly as it should.
Another test. Edinburgh this time. Perfect.
One more for luck—Skye. My fingers hesitate over the keyboard. The booking goes through flawlessly.
I slump back in my chair, finally exhaling properly. I don’t feel completely steady, but it seems okay. I can’t do any more than that.
“You know what?” I announce to my empty desk. “I deserve that retreat.”
I close my laptop, shove it into my bag, and text Roy:
Pub?
His response is instant:
Obviously. Already here. I’ve got you a wine.
Make it large.
Already did. Also got you crisps.
I could cry.
The retreat center is exactly what you’d expect from somewhere called “The Meadow Vale Wellness Sanctuary.”
Twenty of us sit in a circle in what used to be a barn, now converted into a “meditation space.” I’m trying not to think about the spiders that still live in these beams.
They confiscated our phones at reception. The panic I felt handing mine over was genuinely alarming. When did I become someone who can’t exist without a rectangle of glass? Watching it disappear into that hand-woven basket felt like surrendering a vital organ. What if there’s an IRIS emergency? What if the servers catch fire? What if Craig sends an email and I’m not there to immediately catastrophize about it?
The meditation instructor has flowing gray hair and speaks like she’s narrating a relaxation app. Actually, she might be the same woman from my public speaking app.
“Empty your mind,” she whispers. “Let thoughts drift past like clouds.”
My thoughts are not clouds.
“Breathe,” she encourages.
I try. Honestly, I do.
Everyone else looks serene, discovering inner peace or their third eye or whatever. The woman beside me hasn’t moved in thirty minutes. She might have transcended. Or died. Hard to tell.
After meditation, we do pottery. The instructor demonstrates how to “let the clay speak to you.” My clay is mute. I create something that might be a bowl if you’re very generous. It’s lopsided, thick on one side, thin on the other, with an unintentional dent.
The instructor calls it “wonderfully organic.”
“You can really see the emotion in the form,” she says, tilting her head thoughtfully.
Yes. The emotion is “help.”
Later, during the journaling session, something shifts. We’re in the garden, each with a recycled paper journal that smells like hemp. The instructor suggests we write letters we’ll never send.
“Let the words flow without judgment,” she says softly. “This is just for you.”
My pen hovers over the blank page. Then Patrick’s name appears before I can stop it.
