“So what do you think?”
“About what?”
Paddy’s face folded into an expression that was close to a glare as he ever got. “About the office. The Internet. And what you could use it for.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You. All that stuff you said about not being able to stay here longer than a week because you needed the Internet to work remotely. You could do that here.”
Oh. I’d been so wrapped up in thinking about Fen, I hadn’t thought about the practicalities of the office in the sky and what it could mean for me. And aside from arguing with Safia about it, I’d tried not to think about work at all. My job was consuming when I allowed it to be, and recently I’d had too much grief in my personal life to let that happen. I loved my work, but perhaps the truth was I already had one foot out the door. “I guess I could use it to catch up with my inbox. It’s taking two hours to update on my phone.”
“Try it.” Paddy stretched again and fiddled with the satellite router. A couple of green lights flashed. “There. It’s on.”
“Do you need a password to connect to it?”
“How would I know?”
“Thought you had the answers to all my problems?”
“You could always ask Fen.”
Paddy gave me a sly look.
I gave him my middle finger and fished my phone from my pocket.
Paddy snorted and made for the door. “I’ve got goats to round up. Good luck with everything.”
He disappeared before I could contemplate what“everything”meant. Gaze fixed on my phone, I wandered to the futon and sat. Even lagging behind in updates, my inbox was ridiculous. My saving grace was that the offenders I was currently supervising were coming to the end of their probation and no longer required as much attention. Most had one face-to-face meeting left with me, and a handful of calls I could do over Zoom if Isaac’s wonder satellite worked as well as I needed it to.
The Zoom calls were unnecessary, but they made me feel better about the fact that I was miles away from being close enough to reach my offenders if they needed me, and that perhaps I had been for a while now.
It’s not like you abandoned them. You kept your list small so you could focus on them and Charlie at the same time. You’ve never missed an appointment or not been there in a crisis.
But I wasn’t there now. And if I gave what Safia, Paddy, and Fen were saying serious thought, the reality was I’d never be there for them again.
So? They won’t need you forever.
But maybe I needed them.Maybe, my work as a probation officer was so rooted into my DNA by now that I couldn’t give it up.
It’s just a job.
Damn, Safia was loud, even when she was somewhere else.
I opened the connections menu on my phone and searched for the satellite router. My cynicism was so strong I expected it not to be there, but it appeared in seconds asHAWTHORNE TREEHOUSE.I swallowed hard and clicked on it. It connected and my phone was suddenly alive with activity. Notifications. Emails. Missed messages. I couldn’t take it all in.
So I didn’t. I opened my inbox and ignored everything else.
Two hours later, I was caught up and had requested a Zoom meeting with my supervisor.
She called thirty seconds later, her face filling my phone screen with a WhatsApp video call.
I answered with more than a little trepidation. “Hi, Monica.”
She smiled and in my heart, a tiny seed sprouted green shoots.
9
Fen
