Instead, I just feel hollow.
The city skyline comes into view as we cross the bridge back into downtown, the familiar glass and steel landscape that's been home for the past five years. My apartment is small and overpriced, tucked into a building with temperamental heating and neighbors who blast music at ungodly hours, but it's mine. Every piece of furniture, every carefully budgeted decoration, every scratch in the hardwood floor represents something I earned and built myself.
And that matters more than I realized until this moment.
I drag my suitcase up three flights of stairs—the elevator is broken again—and let myself into the apartment, droppingmy bags just inside the door. The space feels smaller than I remember, cramped and suffocating after days spent in the sprawling luxury of the mountain retreat.
My laptop sits on the tiny kitchen table where I left it, surrounded by scattered notes and printed itineraries from the Horde Tech planning process. I sink into the chair and open a fresh document, staring at the blank white screen.
Romee Lin Events,I type slowly, my fingers hovering over the keyboard as if the act of committing these words to the screen might somehow make them real in a way that frightens me more than I'm willing to admit. I backspace, delete, type it again. The cursor blinks at me with what feels like judgment.
Testing how it looks. How it feels to see my name standing alone on the digital page, completely unmoored from the corporate infrastructure that's propped me up for the past five years. NoPinnacle Events. NoExecutive Planning Division.Just me, my name, my reputation, my risk.
Without someone else's company behind it, no safety net, no corporate lawyers ready to shield me from failure, no venerable institution to fall back on when things inevitably go sideways.
It looks terrifying in a way that makes my stomach clench. The kind of terrifying that comes with zero margin for error, with every misstep being entirely, unequivocally my fault.
It looks impossible when I think about the overhead, the competition, the dozen other event planners with more experience and better networks already carving up the market.
It looks exactly right, though. And that's the part that truly frightens me—because wanting something this badly means I've already given it the power to destroy me.
The first weekis a blur of paperwork, legal consultations, and caffeine-fueled late nights. I drain my savings account tocover the LLC filing fees and the bare-bones website hosting, and I set up a business email address that feels both professional and completely surreal.
My phone stays mercifully silent. No calls from Thrall, no messages, no attempts to insert himself into my process or offer unsolicited advice. The black business card sits on my nightstand, a constant reminder of what I walked away from and what might be waiting on the other side of this exhausting gauntlet I've built for myself.
I don't let myself think about him during the day. I can't afford the distraction, can't afford to let my focus splinter when I'm barely holding this fragile new venture together with determination and spite.
But at night, alone in my too-small bed, I let myself remember his hands, the rumble of his voice, the way he looked at me like I was the only thing in the room that mattered.
The second week is worse. I send out inquiry emails to every corporate contact I've built over the years, carefully worded pitches that highlight my experience without directly badmouthing my former agency. Most go unanswered. A few respond with polite rejections, citing budget constraints or existing vendor relationships.
I start to panic around day ten, when my carefully calculated financial runway starts looking less like a safety net and more like a ticking time bomb. I have maybe six weeks before I'm forced to go crawling back into traditional employment, back to working under someone else's thumb and swallowing my pride just to make rent.
The thought makes me physically nauseous.
I double down, working eighteen-hour days, cold-calling potential clients, reaching out to old colleagues who might be willing to throw some freelance work my way. I live on instant ramen and cheap coffee, my hair perpetually pulled into a messybun, my tailored blazers abandoned in favor of worn sweatshirts and leggings.
I look like hell. I feel like hell.
But I'm doing this myself, on my own terms, and that has to count for something.
Three weeks in,I'm sitting at my kitchen table at two in the morning, my laptop screen blurring in front of my exhausted eyes as I revise my portfolio for the hundredth time. The apartment is silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional siren wailing past on the street below.
My phone buzzes, and I almost ignore it, assuming it's another spam call or a late-night text from a friend checking in on my deteriorating mental state.
But something makes me look.
Email notification. New inquiry through my website contact form.
My heart kicks against my ribs as I click over to my inbox, refreshing the page twice to make sure I'm not hallucinating from sleep deprivation.
From:[email protected]
Subject:Corporate Event Inquiry - Horde Tech Software
I observe the sender line, my breath catching in my throat. For a long moment, I can't move, can't think, can't do anything except reread those words over and over until they burn themselves into my retinas.
My finger hovers over the delete button. This is what I was afraid of, exactly the kind of interference I specifically told him I didn't want. He promised to respect my boundaries, to let me build this on my own, and here he is barely three weeks later trying to hand me a contract on a silver platter.
