It was March 2020. The streets grew quieter. Tourists vanished. The familiar rhythm of days—bookings, arrivals, the hum of a small town coming alive—stretched into pauses that grew longer with each sunrise.
The shuttering wasn’t a choice; it was a ghost town’s command. I gathered the team—the faces that had become the backbone of everything we built—and saw their futures suddenly suspended. We didn’t just close the doors. We broke the bank to make sure they could get home, to their families. Money pressed into hands—not a severance, but a bridge.
“Go home,” I told them. “This is just a pause. When the world wakes up, we’ll bring you back.”
I believed it then.
We moved through the space, noticing the absence: empty tables, silent corridors, inventory sitting in the dark like museum exhibits. Conversations about the future grew heavier, circling the same questions: What now? How do we keep going?
News arrived like a relentless tide—rates rising, borders closing. What we thought would be months began to feel like something without a horizon.
We reached out to the landlord—the one we had paid faithfully for so long—and were met with silence. No empathy. No negotiation. Just the cold weight of a lease that did not care about a global catastrophe.
The world outside had shifted.
We were still standing inside what we had built, trying to understand what it meant now.