THE INTERVIEW

10: Failure Cluster

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Q43. "Tell me about a time you failed someone who trusted you."

The question landed in the silence like a stone dropped into still water. Dale felt the ripples spreading through him—the instinct to deflect, to soften, to find the interview-friendly version of failure that demonstrated growth and learning.

But something had shifted in the past two hours. The walls he usually kept up, the professional distance, the careful performance—they'd eroded, question by question, confession by confession. He was too tired to perform anymore. Too hollowed out.

"My daughter," he said. "I failed my daughter. Every day for twenty-nine years."

Ms. Vance waited. The pen rested on the legal pad. The room held its breath.

"I told myself I was working for her. All those hours, all those double shifts, all those missed dinners and forgotten recitals and broken promises—it was for her, I said. For the family. But that was a lie. The truth was, I didn't know how to be her father. I knew how to be an employee. I knew how to be a supervisor. I knew how to manage inventory and meet deadlines and solve problems that had solutions. But a daughter—" He shook his head. "A daughter doesn't have solutions. A daughter just needs you to be there. And I wasn't. I was always somewhere else, doing something that felt more manageable than loving her."

"You make it sound like a choice."

"It was a choice. Every time I said yes to overtime instead of coming home, that was a choice. Every time I let Linda handle the hard stuff because I was too tired or too scared—that was a choice. I chose the job over her, again and again, until choosing wasn't necessary anymore. Until she'd learned not to ask."

"When did she stop asking?"

Dale tried to pinpoint it. There must have been a moment—a last request, a final reaching out that he'd failed to meet. But he couldn't find it. The memory was just a long slow fade, his daughter's voice growing quieter year by year until one day he realized she wasn't talking to him anymore.

"I don't know," he said. "I didn't notice when it happened. That's the worst part. She gave up on me, and I was so busy working that I didn't even see it."

---

Q44. "When did you first realize you weren't going to become the person you thought you'd be?"

The question opened something in Dale's chest, a door he'd kept locked for decades.

"I was thirty-five," he said slowly. "Melissa was six. I'd just gotten the promotion at Morrison—shift supervisor to operations manager. I should have been celebrating. I'd worked for years to get there. But I remember coming home that night, walking through the door, and Linda was putting Melissa to bed. I could hear them upstairs—Linda reading a story, Melissa asking questions about the pictures. And I realized—"

He stopped. The memory was vivid, painfully clear: standing in the hallway of the old house, briefcase in hand, listening to voices upstairs that didn't need him.

"I realized I was already gone. Even when I was there, I wasn't there. I was thinking about the job, the new responsibilities, all the ways I had to prove myself worthy of the promotion. My daughter was six years old, and I was already a ghost in her life. And I knew—I knew right then—that I was never going to be the father I'd imagined being. The father who coached Little League and built tree houses and knew his daughter's friends by name. That person was already dead. I'd killed him with a thousand small choices, and I hadn't even noticed him dying."

"But you stayed. You kept working."

"What else was I going to do? Quit? Go back to shift work and tell Linda we'd have to sell the house?" He shook his head. "The promotion was supposed to be the reward for all the sacrifice. The proof that it was worth it. I couldn't walk away from that. So I leaned in. Worked harder. Told myself that the money I was making would give Melissa opportunities, would set her up for success. And maybe it did. She went to college. She has a good job. She has a life. But she doesn't have a father. Not really."

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Q45. "What do you tell yourself at 3 AM when you can't sleep?"

Dale almost smiled. Almost. "You know about the 3 AM?"

"Everyone has a 3 AM. What's yours?"

"I tell myself—" He took a breath. "I tell myself that it's not too late. That tomorrow might be different. That the next application might be the one, the next interview might lead somewhere. I tell myself that I still have time to fix things with Linda, with Melissa. That the eleven months are just a detour, not a destination."

"Do you believe it?"

"At 3 AM?" He shook his head. "At 3 AM, I don't believe anything. At 3 AM, I just lie there running the numbers. The mortgage. The credit cards. The savings account that's been bleeding out for almost a year. The math that doesn't work no matter how many times I do it. And I think about—"

He stopped.

"What do you think about?"

"Failure." The word came out flat, heavy. "I think about all the ways I've failed. The jobs I didn't get. The interviews I bombed. The years I wasted at Morrison thinking loyalty meant something. I lie there in the dark and I catalog every mistake, every wrong turn, every moment where I could have done something different and didn't. It's like watching a car crash in slow motion. You can see exactly where it went wrong, but you can't change it. You just have to watch it happen, over and over, until the sun comes up."

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Q46. "What's the lie you've told so many times you almost believe it?"

Dale was quiet for a long moment. The question required an honesty he wasn't sure he could afford—not in an interview, not to a stranger. But the stranger was watching him with those patient, colorless eyes, and the room was quiet except for the hum of the lights, and he found himself answering anyway.

"That the work was worth it," he said. "That all those hours, all those years, all the things I sacrificed—they added up to something. That I built something that mattered. That's the lie. The lie I've told Linda, told Melissa, told myself. The work was worth it. The work was the point. The work was—"

He stopped. The words had run out.

"The work was what?" Ms. Vance asked softly.

"Everything." His voice cracked on the word. "The work was everything. And now it's nothing. And I don't know what that makes me."

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Q47. "Tell me about your first day at Morrison. The details."

The question caught Dale off guard—a sudden turn from the emotional excavation to something concrete, specific. He reached for the memory gratefully, looking for solid ground.

"It was—" He paused. Concentrated. "It was a Monday. January, I think. Cold. I remember being nervous. I'd been working at Jackson Brothers before that, and Morrison was bigger, more professional. I felt like I was stepping up."

"What do you remember about the building? The layout?"

"The building was—" He frowned. The image was there, he could almost see it, but the details were soft, unfocused. "Brick. Red brick, I think. And the warehouse floor was—it was big. Bigger than Jackson Brothers. Lots of natural light from the skylights."

"Who was your first supervisor there?"

"My supervisor was—" He stopped. The name was right there. He'd worked for the man for three years before getting promoted. He could see the face—heavyset, balding, a mustache that needed trimming. But the name—

"I'm sorry," Dale said. "I'm blanking on his name. It's been a long time."

"What was he like?"

"He was—" The details slipped away as he reached for them. Heavyset. Balding. The mustache. But his voice? His manner? The way he'd trained Dale on the floor systems? It was all fog. "I'm sorry. I can't—I remember being there. I remember how I felt. But the specifics—"

"That's okay." Ms. Vance's voice was gentle. "You've been talking for a long time. The mind wanders."

"It's not wandering. It's—" Dale pressed his fingers to his temples. The headache was worse now, a steady pulse behind his eyes. "I talked about Morrison earlier. I told you about the twelve years, the promotion, the QC system I helped implement. I could see it all clearly then. But now—"

"Now?"

"Now it's like—like looking at a photograph that's been left in the sun. The colors are fading. The edges are blurring." He dropped his hands, looked at Ms. Vance. "Is that normal? For memories to fade while you're talking about them?"

"Stress affects memory in unpredictable ways." Her pen hadn't moved. She wasn't writing any of this down. "You're under a lot of pressure, Dale. Eleven months of uncertainty. The weight of this interview. It's natural for the mind to prioritize. To let go of what it doesn't need in order to focus on what's important."

"But Morrison is important. Morrison was twelve years of my life."

"Was it?" Ms. Vance tilted her head slightly. "Or was it just where you happened to be for twelve years? There's a difference between importance and duration."

Dale opened his mouth to argue, to insist that Morrison had mattered, that those years had shaped him. But the words wouldn't come. Because when he reached for Morrison now—for the building, the people, the work he'd done there—he found only impressions. Shapes without names. Colors without meaning.

The supervisor's face was fading. Heavyset. Balding. Was there a mustache? He thought there was a mustache.

He couldn't be sure anymore.

---

Q48. "What does loyalty mean when the company doesn't reciprocate?"

"It means you're a fool." The words came out harsh, unfiltered. "It means you gave yourself to something that was never going to give back. Twelve years at Morrison, and they let me go in a fifteen-minute meeting. Thanked me for my service like I was a soldier being discharged. Handed me a box for my things and walked me out the door."

"You're angry."

"I was angry. For a long time. But anger takes energy, and I don't have energy to spare anymore. Now I'm just—tired. Tired of believing in things that don't believe back."

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Q49. "What do you deserve?"

The question sat in the air between them, heavy and expectant. Dale turned it over in his mind, looking for the angle, the right way to frame his answer.

But he was tired of angles. Tired of framing. Tired of the performance.

"I don't know," he said. "I used to think I deserved recognition. Reward for the work I'd put in. A pension and a gold watch, like my father's generation talked about. But that's not how it works anymore. Maybe it never worked that way. Maybe 'deserve' is just a story we tell ourselves to make the labor feel meaningful."

"That's very cynical."

"It's very honest." He met her eyes, those not-quite-colored depths that seemed to drink in everything he said. "I don't know what I deserve. I don't know if deserve even means anything. All I know is what I need. I need a job. I need to feel useful. I need to stop watching my wife's face every morning and seeing the worry she's trying to hide. That's not about deserving. That's about survival."

"And if you don't get this job? If you walk out of here with nothing?"

"Then I keep going." The words came out flat, automatic. "I keep applying. Keep interviewing. Keep performing hope until hope becomes real or I run out of runway."

"And if you run out of runway?"

Dale was quiet for a long moment. The room seemed to press in on him, the walls closer, the ceiling lower, the air thicker with each breath.

"I don't think about that," he said finally. "I can't afford to think about that."

Ms. Vance nodded slowly. She glanced at her legal pad, at the notes she'd been taking—though Dale realized he hadn't seen her write anything for several minutes now.

"I think," she said, "we need to take a brief pause. I need to step out for a moment."

Dale blinked. "Is everything okay?"

"Everything's fine." She stood—smooth, unhurried, no small adjustments or settling. Just standing, complete and immediate. "I just need to check on something. Please wait here. I'll be right back."

She moved toward the wall to Dale's left—and there was a door there, a door he hadn't noticed before. Had it always been there? He thought the wall had been solid. He thought—

"Ms. Vance?"

She paused, hand on the doorknob. "Yes?"

"How long will you be?"

"Just a moment." She smiled, that professional smile. "Help yourself to more water. I'll be right back."

The door opened. Closed. She was gone.

And Dale was alone in the room.