I'm not going to dress that up. There's no announcement to explain the gap, no "exciting news" to justify the silence. The truth is simpler and more honest than that: I stepped away. Not from Vera — from the pace. From the constant forward motion that makes you feel productive but doesn't always make you better.

The longer version is that I spent time strengthening relationships — with the people closest to me, with people I'd let distance grow between. I worked on communication. Not the startup kind, where you practice your pitch until it's frictionless. The real kind. The kind where you sit with someone and say the thing that's hard to say, and then you listen to what comes back.

I followed …