“What?”
“I can’t find any record of it. I can’t see my email to you. Normally, all the checks and references are in the staff database, but there’s nothing there. I’ve just gone into DegreeVerify because that’s the easiest thing to look at online, and there’s nothing there either.”
“Who would have been responsible for it?”
She goes quiet. “Well ... me. God, I’m so sorry, James. I can’t believe …”
“Cath. Don’t sweat it. Just check our filing, yeah? It was a crazy time. We were right at the start of having any formal systems. You were working full tilt setting up the software to manage our delivery, if I remember. Sometimes I think we forget how far we’ve come in such a short time. If you haven’t done it or can’t find the records, can you run the checks now and let me know?” But God, I don’t want to sit on this for days, do I? “How long will it take?”
“Well, the degrees will take five minutes; there’s an online database we use, though overseas qualifications are more difficult. Other things might take longer. Was there something you wanted me to look for?”
What do I tell Cath here? I don’t want anyone to know that this is about Sadie.
“Not particularly. Give me a shout when you’ve done the degrees, and then you can fill in the other stuff later.”
“Okay, James. I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be, Cath. We all make mistakes all the time. Find them, fix them. That’s my motto.” God, I sound like some cheesy management guru.
“Thanks for being so understanding,” she says and hangs up.
I sit back down at the table, pull up my emails, and finally start catching up on the day. After about ten minutes, my phone rings.
“Hi,” Cath says. “I’ve run the degree checks and they’re all fine except Sadie Turner. She didn’t come up on the CUNY database. There can be reasons why people don’t appear, so I’m sure it’s just a logistical problem. I’ll talk to their admissions tomorrow and clear it up.”
My stomach turns over. I’m getting a terrible feeling about this. “What kind of reasons?”
“We could have some of her information wrong, or it could be incorrectly input. Databases aren’t infallible.”
Sadie’s mom’s words ricochet around in my head.There are very few businesses that are prepared to take on people who struggle at school these days, and Sadie and I are very grateful for it.
Shit.
“Thanks, Cath.”
“I’ll let you know about the other checks.”
“See you tomorrow.” And I hang up.
There are some odd things about Sadie, some gaps in her knowledge that occasionally seem strange, but then her programming skills are excellent. Something soft worms through me. Sadie’s had such a rough time of it. I should be mad, but all I feel is deep sympathy. Do we have tofireher? A sharp stab runs through my chest. I couldn’t do that to her. And the last thing I want is for her to leave the company or the apartment. The idea of not living with Sadie … A jagged breath sucks into my lungs. For perhaps the first time in my life, I’m having fun. If you said to anyone that Sadie was fun, they’d probably laugh at you, but with her dry sense of humor and her quiet acceptance, she feels like the best kind of fun to me.
I turn my phone over in my hand and pull up my contacts. Des is third on the list after Sadie and Cath. I stand up and walk through to the living room, grabbing my keys from the table. I want to get out and move for this conversation. It’s still early in Korea, but knowing him, he’ll be up, so as I’m heading out of the building, I press his number.
“James! To what do I owe the honor of a crazy-o’clock call?”
“I’m calling about Sadie.”
He chuckles. “Straight to the point as always. Is something up?”
Where do I start?
“I went back home with Sadie to her mom’s place to pick up the rest of her stuff. As we were leaving, her mom took me to one side and thanked me for taking on somebody who had struggled so much at school, and said it meant everything to her. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Sadie has a degree in Computing Science: Whywouldn’tsomeone take her on?”
Des hums in my ear.
“Then tonight, Jane said to me that she’d had a conversation with Sadie about CUNY, which is the college on her resume, and she said Sadie knew almost nothing about it, that she was vague about where her classes were, and Jane was suspicious about whether she’d ever been there.”
A long silence ensues on the other end of the line. “Sadie met Jane?”
