in the few minutes between very urgent phone calls, while leaning back in his black leather executive’s chair and scanning the city below his office window (several dozens of floors above ground level), he takes a second to think back to when this all began. he might not have always been the type of person who felt extreme satisfaction when his title leapt from VP to SVP; and it could have been possible — at some point in the distant past — that he would never have become this person at all. he remembers the awkwardness of getting a phone call on his brand new cellular phone (years past most people’s adoption of the new technology), while at his job, from a human relations person at one of the country’s largest advertising agencies. the embarrassing dilemma of trying to arrange an interview for a better position while sitting at the desk of your current one. but he managed, and the interview time was set. this could be the big first step, he remembered thinking.

but maybe it started before that. maybe he would never have come this far, and his office would never be nearly so high off the ground, if he hadn’t let her go. it wasn’t his choice of course, but you can never fully escape thinking that it was somehow your fault that she wanted to leave, can you. reality has a tendency to blur in those situations.

it’s nice to have so many extra rooms in his apartment, such a mammoth television screen; and his car does go very fast when the traffic is thin enough. but things could be drastically different today if not for what happened back then. values, decisions, paths in life — all totally dissimilar to the ones he had chosen, which happened to lead to this wildly successful career. he was proud of how far he’d come, how high he’d risen, how well-dressed he could afford to be, there was no denying it. but anyone might wonder how things would be different if things hadn’t fell apart with her; if he’d done or said just the right things that one summer…

but then the phone starts to ring, and he snaps forward to answer it, because he leads a very important life.