Thursday afternoon, late, my Atlanta apartment. The deliverable just went out. One client. One deliverable. One small green checkmark in my inbox telling me the email landed.

The client is a mid-size manufacturing firm out in Norcross. The contact is a guy named Edwards who I met at a Howard alumni Zoom in April when nothing else was happening, when the country was on fire and locked inside at the same time and the Zooms were how anybody met anybody. Edwards said he needed a leadership consult for his ops team. I said I could do it. He asked for my rate. I gave him a rate that was forty percent below what I would have charged in LA. He said yes immediately.

I knew what that meant. He said yes immediately because the rate was low. He said yes immediately because the country was on fire. He said yes immediately because we were both Howard and that meant something even now, even with all of this.

I took the engagement. I took it the way you take the first dollar of any rebuild — gratefully, without asking too many questions about what it costs in the moment.

The deliverable went out at four. I checked the spreadsheet three times before I hit send. There is no second set of eyes on this work anymore. There is no junior to catch a typo. There is no Alexis to say Shaun, baby, this needs another pass. There is only me. I am the only set of eyes. I checked three times because there is no fourth.

Edwards is going to read it tonight. He is going to email me tomorrow with edits. I will make the edits in the morning. I will send the v2 by noon. The engagement will continue.

This is a rebuild. This is what a rebuild looks like.

The pandemic is on. Atlanta is quiet. The streets are quiet in a way that they never used to be quiet. There is a building across from me that used to have lights on in the windows at all hours, because the people who lived there worked the late shift at the hospital, and the building has gone dim because the late shift moved their schedules to be inside whenever they're not at the hospital. The hospital is the place to fear right now. The hospital is full.

I been ordering groceries. Mama call twice a week and ask if I am eating, and I say yes, Mama, and she ask if I am sleeping, and I say enough, and she suck her teeth and tell me a story about somebody from the church and we move on.

She don't ask about Alexis. She never did. Mama is the kind of woman who watch and don't ask. She watched me leave for LA at thirty-one. She watched me come back to Marcus's spare bedroom for a week. She watched me get on a plane to Atlanta. She has watched the entire arc and she has not asked me about the woman whose name is at the center of it. She is letting me find my own way to talk about it.

Jasmine ask. Jasmine ask all the time. Brudduh, you okay? and I say I'm okay, and she say you sure? and I say I'm sure, and she say Shaun. Brother. Brother. That is how Jasmine handle me. With the third brother doing all the work.

She tell me I should come home. New York. She and Marcus both. They been telling me since I landed in Atlanta. I told them I needed to do this here, by myself, without rebuilding inside the cushion of family. They said okay. They didn't push. They have not stopped saying it.

I am thirty-three years old. I am in a one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta that I picked because the building is decent and the rent is low. The apartment has my desk and my bed and a coffee maker and a chair. I do not own a couch. I have not bought art for the walls. The walls are white because the building put them white and I have not asked them to be any other color.

I sit on the floor at night when I want to read. The floor is fine. The floor is not the thing about my life right now.

The thing is the email I just sent. The thing is the green checkmark. The thing is that I produced a deliverable, by myself, for a client I found, at a rate I quoted, with a methodology I rewrote three times to make it mine — mine, the word doing work — and it went out and the inbox said it went out and it is now sitting in Edwards's inbox in Norcross.

One client. One deliverable. One green checkmark.

Marcus's voice in my head: Rebuild. One client at a time.

I am rebuilding. I am one client. I am one deliverable.

That counts.

That counts more than I am ready to admit it counts.