But that didn’t happen. Development stalled and the money started to run out. I was forced to recruit mediocre talent because we couldn’t compete with the salaries other companies were offering. Six months later I was fired from my position as head of development, and one of those unremarkable employees took over my role for half the pay. His name was Nicolai, a strange bird who had graduated from college only three years ago; one of those people who thinks that anyone who doesn’t vacation abroad at least once a year is living below the poverty line. He still calls me once a month to bitch about his problems at work, failing to comprehend that I have no interest in helping him, even though I’ve been laying on pretty thick hints about it.

Anyway, instead of celebrating my fortieth birthday on a yacht bound for the Canary Islands like we’ve always talked about, Nelly and I settled for Eyal Shani’s new joint. Rockstar Shlomi Shaban and his actress wife, Yuval Scharf, sat at the table to our right. It was there, shortly before our dessert arrived—chocolate cake sprinkled with sea salt—that Nelly brought up the idea of moving south. “For half a year tops.” She said Zuzovsky had asked her to set up the new offices in Mitzpe Ramon. She talked about the unexploited potential of the residents of the Negev. She said that if she did a good job, she’d climb another rung on the ladder to CEO. And that the timing couldn’t be better because her parents would be staying in LA for at least another year, so we could live on their farm on Highway 40, a fifteen-minute drive to Mitzpe. Then she launched into a ten-minute monologue about why living at the end of the earth was actually a good thing. That the clean air would do wonders for Shira’s asthma. That we always said we wanted to check the living-outside-a-major-city box. And besides, it would be significantly cheaper living on the farm because her parents were even paying the electricity and water, so instead of looking for a new job I could work on developing that app I’d been talking about for over a year now. And what she really wanted to say but chose not to was that it had been two months since I’d been let go and I still hadn’t gotten off the couch. That if I wanted to continue being unemployed and depressed, at least I could do it in rent-free shitsville.

I didn’t actually need much convincing. Back then, all I wanted was to take a breather. To stop for a moment and figure out what my next step should be after failing to accomplish my one goal.