A Thousand Tuesdays

Mae had finally done it. The app was live. SpeakFree

The last puzzle piece clicked into place at 10:17 a.m. on a quiet Tuesday. No audience. No dramatic music. Just a soft sigh from Mae Halpern as she sat back in her chair and stared at the screen.

After sixteen years of coding on nights and weekends, freelancing to pay the bills while patching together her dream, Mae had finally done it. The app was live. SpeakFree—a speech-to-voice software built specifically for people with ALS—was now in the hands of users across five continents.

The goal wasn’t money, though she wouldn’t turn it down. The goal was a voice. For someone like her father, who had passed before she could finish building the tool. For people who were still fighting.

Her inbox buzzed with early feedback. “My husband smiled for the first time in months,” one message said. Another: “My son told me he loved me. I haven’t heard that since 2020.”

Mae’s chest tightened. It wasn’t pride, exactly. It was relief. Like she had been holding her breath for more than a decade and could finally let go.

She stood up and stretched. Her apartment was quiet, save for the hum of her old desktop tower, the one that had somehow survived four apartments, three moves, and two breakups. She glanced at the open window where the breeze played with a sticky note taped to the sill: Just finish it.

So now what?

For the first time in years, she had no roadmap, no deadline scrawled on a whiteboard, no lines of code waiting in a to-do list. The question hung in the air like steam rising from a cooling cup of coffee: What comes after the goal?

Mae changed into jeans and sneakers, grabbed her keys, and headed to the park.

She wasn’t a runner, not really, but she liked the feel of the path under her feet. It was a mild day, late spring, with just enough sun to make everything look sharper. The trees leaned in over the trail, and the air smelled like dirt and dandelions. For once, she wasn’t running on borrowed time.

Halfway through her second lap, she spotted the old man again. He sat on the same bench as always, feeding squirrels bits of bread and muttering to himself. She’d seen him nearly every week, but never stopped.

Today she did.

“You always sit here,” she said, pulling her earbuds out.

He looked up, amused. “And you always jog past.”

She smiled. “I guess I had a lot on my mind.”

“Not anymore?”

“Not today.”

“Then sit,” he said, patting the bench.

She did. And for ten quiet minutes, they watched squirrels bicker over crusts and listened to kids scream joyfully from the playground.

“What did you finish?” he asked out of nowhere.

Mae blinked. “How’d you know I was finishing something?”

He tapped his temple. “You’ve had the look. People working toward something always have it. Tension in the shoulders, a kind of distance in the eyes. I call it the Tuesday Grit.”

“The Tuesday Grit?”

“Sure,” he said. “Because most goals don’t end in fireworks. They end quietly, on a Tuesday, when no one’s looking.”

Mae laughed. “That’s… actually perfect.”

He smiled. “So what was it?”

She hesitated, but then said, “An app. For people who can’t speak. Helps them sound like themselves again.”

The old man grew still. “My wife had ALS. Died five years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“She used to tell me what to say for her,” he said. “I always worried I wasn’t getting it right. That I didn’t use her tone. Her rhythm. You know?”

Mae nodded. “That’s exactly why I built it. So they don’t have to rely on someone else.”

He gave a small nod, his eyes wet but smiling. “Then you gave people something priceless.”

She didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.

When she got home, the sunlight was dimming, and her apartment smelled like the jasmine candle she’d left burning too long. She poured a glass of water and sat down again, but this time not at her desk. She opened her laptop on the couch and stared at the blinking cursor.

No code. No outlines.

She opened a blank document. Titled it A Thousand Tuesdays.

And she started to write. Not about how she made the app. But about what it took—guilt, love, obsession, silence, loss. The late-night ramen. The time she missed her best friend’s wedding because her father was slipping away and she had this crazy idea she might save his voice. The text messages she never answered. The therapy she never finished.

She wrote the truth. Because maybe someone else needed to read it.

She wrote through the night.

When dawn broke, she hit save.

And then she slept.

Word Count: 1,829