THIRTY-FOUR
X
anthe splashed cool water on her face and dabbed her skin dry with a paper towel before straightening to confront her reflection in the mirror.Her nose and cheeks were blotchy, and her eyes were puffy and red.Everyone would know she’d been crying.
She pushed out a sigh, running her fingers through her short hair.Today had been the chocolate sprinkles on top of the shit sundae that had been her life the past week.
Watching her beloved stepfather take his last shallow breaths before losing his battle to pancreatic cancer had been excruciating.She was having a hard time getting it out of her head.
Knowing he was no longer suffering was the only comfort.Accepting that he was gone forever, would never be there to hug her or listen or offer advice or encouragement ever again, was still too painful to contemplate.
Then today, finding out that they were going to lose this research facility in a matter of months was a kick in the face.And knowing that rich asshole developer was living the high life, treating this incredibly rare and beautiful place like his own personal playground to make more money, just made her sick.
“Okay, universe.Help me out,” she whispered.
She wasn’t religious—though she came pretty close to something like that when it came to science.But she had a strong spiritual side.She refused to believe she’d been so awful in a prior life to deserve constant pain and disappointment.
Something better had to come from all of this misery.It had to.
Allistair, another postdoc working with their team looked up from his computer when she returned to her workstation.“Whoa, you okay, girl?”
“Fine,” she answered, pulling up her latest spreadsheet of data.“Just been a shit week.”
He made a sympathetic sound.“That development deal is bullshit.”
“It is.”She’d already reached out to a law professor she knew at UW and was waiting to find out what could be done to block this.In the meantime, she had a job to do.
She kept working, could feel Allistair watching her as she accessed her most recent data sets.“What?”
“Are you sure you wanna be here right now?It’s okay to take some time off.You deserve time to grieve your loss.”
“I need to keep working.”Right now, it was the only thing keeping her sane.
“Just saying.No one will think any less of you if you take some time off, and if they did, I’d beat their ass.But just know you’ve got our support, whatever you decide.”He leaned over and squeezed her shoulder.“We’re all here for you, girl.”
She smiled a little.Their team was small but close knit, and they all worked well together, focused on the larger mission to protect and preserve the incredibly rich and fragile ecosystem here in the Pacific Northwest that too few people seemed to give a flying fuck about.
Least of all entitled multi-millionaire or billionaire real estate developers, whatever he was.“Thanks.”
“Anytime.”He put his headphones on and went back to listening to humpback songs.His current research was comparing songs from animals in their region to when they were in their summer feeding grounds around here and up to Alaska, and then again to their songs in the Hawaiian Islands during breeding season in the winter and early spring.
The humpbacks had made an incredible recovery.But Xanthe’s beloved resident orcas had not been as fortunate.Right now they were struggling to survive, their numbers dwindling to dangerously low levels.If something didn’t drastically change soon to protect them and their food source, they would be on the brink of extinction.
“Not that fucking real estate developers give a shit,” she muttered to herself, angrily stabbing the return key to bring up another spreadsheet.
“What’s that?”Allistair pulled off his headphones, looking at her.
“Nothing.Ignore me.”
“Kay.Cool.”He went back to his humpback songs.
