“And yet here you are, speaking it aloud to me. That makes you part of it, whether you like it or not. Don’t mistake your obsession for independence, Dr.Blackwell—closeness breeds suspicion. If thesewrongpeople uncover what you just did,you’ll look less like a diligent curator and more like my accomplice.”
And here it was, the leash being tugged. She should just report it and be done with it. But then where would her answers be?
Penelope pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Your father—”
“Leave him out of this!”
Silence.
“As you wish.”
“I’ll keep you updated.” Penelope hung up, resisting the urge to hurl her phone against…something. She sometimes missed the phones of her youth; the kind you could slam onto the receiver with satisfying finality, with a dismissal she couldn’t afford.
~ ~ ~
By the time Penelope made it home, it was already past ten. The silence of her home welcomed her like a familiar bruise—dull, settled, always there. She fed and petted Fuller before showering and heading to bed, once more skipping dinner. A recurring habit she needed to cull.
Saturday found her buried in her work once more, this time in her home office, with Fuller snoozing atop a stack of books at the edge of her desk, her soft purring the only sound in the room.
Stacks of papers and journals flanked her keyboard, her tailored blouse half-untucked from hours of shifting in her chair.
“You need a life, Pen,” she muttered when her ornate grandfather clock struck noon.
She reheated a slice of leftover pizza, intending to curl up on the couch with Fuller afterward and maybe watch something mindless on the TV, when her phone rang.
“Hi, Mom,” Penelope answered.
“Hi, sweetheart. How are you?”
“Good, same old.”
“Working too much?”
Penelope rolled her eyes, resisting the dry “Look who’s talking,” from spilling from her lips. Her mother worked as a sought-after ethics and moral philosophy professor at Columbia University, and leisure had never taken up a significant space in her life.
“There’s a lot to do at work.”
“There’s more to life than work.”
“Maybe I need to get a bit older to embrace that notion.”
“I’d say forty-three is plenty old for a shift in perspective.”
Penelope sighed. “Did you call just to criticize me?”
“No, sweetheart. Of course not. I do apologize.” Her mother’s voice faltered.
“What is it? Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes. I just… I spoke to your father.”
Penelope straightened. “How is he?”
“Oh, you know him. Still too proud to allow a visit.”
A pause. Penelope’s gaze drifted to Fuller, who seemed to be stalking a spider.
