I worked eighteen-hour days for eleven years. I ate peanut butter crackers for dinner at my desk. I didn’t take a real vacation until I was thirty-seven.
Ezoic
Then a bigger company bought mine.
I won’t say the number. I’ll just say I walked out of the lawyer’s office that day and sat in my car in the parking garage for forty minutes, shaking, because I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
I put almost all of it into a separate investment account in my own name. I bought a modest house in Richmond with a deep porch and a magnolia tree in the yard. I started taking long walks. I learned to make pie crust from scratch.
And two years later, at a charity dinner for a food bank, I met Richard Cole.
Ezoic
He was standing by the dessert table telling a story to a group of people, and they were all laughing. He had that kind of voice. Warm. Easy. The kind of man who makes a room feel like a party just by walking into it.
