Moving day

The acquirer sent a man called Greg to oversee the move. Greg was pleasant and wore a fleece with the acquirer's logo on it and referred to everything, including the eight people in the room, as "assets." Nobody thought he meant it unkindly. That was somehow worse. Leila had signed the papers three weeks earlier in a lawyer's office that smelled of new carpet. The number was fine. Not the number she'd imagined in year one, when she'd let herself imagine numbers, but it paid back the investors, gave everyone on the team something meaningful, and left her with enough that she could, for the first time since she was twenty-six, not know what day her rent came out. The deal was what people in the industry called an acquihire, which meant the buyer wanted the team and didn't especially want the product. The product would be "sunset." Greg had used the word without flinching. "It's a good outcome," her lead investor had said on the phone, and he'd meant it, and she'd agreed with him, and then she'd hung up and sat on the floor of her kitchen for a while. Moving day was a Friday. The office was a converted unit above a tile showroom; they'd been there four years. Marta from the tile place came up with a box of pastries and cried a bit and said the parking would be terrible without them, which didn't make sense but Leila understood. They'd been told to bring only personal items. The desks and chairs had been bought by a leasing company. The monitors were assets. Leila had assumed the whiteboards were assets too until Greg, in a moment of unexpected grace, said "I don't think anyone's counting the whiteboards," and helped Dani unscrew the big one from the wall. The big whiteboard had, in the top left corner, a box that nobody had ever erased. It said "v1 - MARCH?" in Leila's handwriting from four years ago, and then underneath it, in three different pens, "APRIL," "MAY (for real)," and "shipped 🎉 June 14." Dani wrapped it in a moving blanket like it was a painting.

"Where are you going to put it?" Leila asked. "Garage. Above the bikes." Dani shrugged. "I'll look at it." Around three o'clock, when the desks were bare, Leila did a thing she'd planned to do quietly and ended up doing in front of everyone. She opened the admin panel on her laptop and went to the status page, the public one, with the little green dots that customers checked when things went wrong. She'd written the copy for it herself, years ago. All systems operational. She changed it. She typed slowly. "This service is closing on the 30th. Thank you for four years. Your data export is in Settings and will work until then. - the team." She left the dot green. It was true; everything was working. Everything worked right up until it didn't. Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Ahmed said "you forgot the Oxford comma," and she laughed so hard she had to sit down on a desk that no longer belonged to her. Greg drove the van. Leila followed in her car with Dani and the whiteboard in the back seat, wrapped up, the corner of "shipped" just visible where the blanket had slipped. At the lights on the ring road Dani said, "Do you think you'll do it again?" Leila watched the light. "Ask me in a year." "That's a yes." "That's an ask me in a year." The light changed. Behind them the tile showroom's sign flickered on for the evening, and the unit above it was dark for the first time in four years, and she found she couldn't look at it in the mirror, so she didn't.