The week after the wine-cellar conversation, the caseload at Marta’s program went from strained to critical.
The County memo that had been a distant warning became a working directive, and the intake numbers Robby had been managing with careful triage began to spill over the edges of what one person could carry.
The fluorescent lights were still warming up when he arrived each morning.
He stayed until the cleaning staff came through with their carts and their quiet greetings.
Lunch happened at his desk between phone calls: granola bars and coffee gone cold, the fuel of someone running too fast to taste anything.
The folder stack on his desk seemed to reproduce while he wasn’t looking.
Each folder represented a person, a family, a set of needs someone had decided his program could meet.
The weight of each one was small.
The weight of all of them together was something else entirely.
In the middle of a Thursday afternoon, between a denied housing application and a benefits-cut notice, his phone buzzed.
A glance at the screen showed an unknown number, no name he recognized.
Mid-sentence with a client’s coordinator, he let it go.
The phone buzzed again.
A voicemail notification.
The phone went face-down on the desk.
More work waited.
The housing denial needed a response.
The benefits cut needed an appeal letter.
One of his clients had a child who needed a referral that had to go out before the end of the day.
The voicemail could wait.
It sat on his phone, unheard, while the afternoon dissolved into evening.
A coworker stuck her head in around five.
“You eat today?”
“Granola bar.”
“That’s not eating, that’s maintenance.”
“It’s keeping me vertical.
That counts for something.”
“It counts for nothing, but I respect the commitment.” She dropped a second granola bar on his desk anyway and kept moving down the hall, calling out something about the printer to someone he couldn’t see.
.
Marta found him at seven-fifteen, still at his desk, still moving through folders.
She leaned against his doorframe with two cups of tea and the particular look she wore when she was about to tell him something he didn’t want to hear.
“You’ve been here for eleven hours.”
“Nine and a half.
I took a lunch break.”
“Your lunch was a granola bar you ate while on a call with County.
That’s not a break, that’s refueling.”
“Is there a difference?”
“A break implies your brain stops.
Yours never stopped.
I watched you nod at nothing for ten straight minutes.”
She set one of the teas on his desk.
He looked at it.
The steam rose in a thin curl, and he realized he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a hot drink that wasn’t from a vending machine.
“I’m fine, Marta.”
“You’re running on fumes.
And I’m telling you, as your supervisor and as someone who likes you: go home.”
“I have three more folders that need —”
“They’ll be there in the morning.
The program will survive one night without you catching up.
It survived before you got here and it’ll survive after you leave.”
“That’s a very ominous way to tell someone to go home.”
“I contain multitudes.
Go home.”
“What if one of the folders is actually urgent?”
“Then it stays urgent until nine a.m., same as it would if you slept sitting up at that desk.
Urgency doesn’t have a curfew, Robby, but you do.”
“Since when do I have a curfew?”
“Since your supervisor invented one, five seconds ago, out of concern and mild desperation.”
“That’s not a real curfew.
That’s a vibe.”
“The vibe has teeth tonight.
Go home.”
The words after you leave landed differently than she’d intended.
They settled into a space he hadn’t been examining: a reminder that this job, with its fluorescent lights and stacked folders and steady stream of people who needed help, wasn’t his whole life, even though it had started to feel that way.
A relationship was waiting for him at home.
A girlfriend whose mother had just left a voicemail he hadn’t listened to.
A life outside these walls, and it was waiting.
He hadn’t thought, in the scramble of keeping up, about what it meant to be this essential to a system this strained.
The program needed him, and needing him meant he couldn’t afford to slow down, but slowing down was exactly what he needed to do to stay effective.
A trap with no clean exit, and no memo warning him it was coming.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“I’ll go home.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“I’ll go home, Marta.
I promise.
Ten more minutes and I’m gone.”
“That’s not what going home means, but I’ll take it as a down payment.”
.
Across town, Jess sat on her bed with her phone in her hands.
She’d been composing a message to Robby for ten minutes, each attempt more tentative than the last.
She wanted to tell him about the vice-principal conversation.
Josh Fenn’s casual mention, Cece’s pointed questions, the way the idea had started to feel real in her chest.
But something held her back.
The texts he’d sent this week had been shorter than usual, quicker, efficient by felt slightly off.
He was busy.
She knew he was busy.
But the distance was new, and she couldn’t tell whether it was real or just the shape of a hard week.
She typed: Thinking of you.
Hope your week gets less crazy.
She deleted it.
She typed: Hey, want to talk about something when you have a minute?
Nothing bad, just a thing.
She deleted that too.
Read it back once before deleting, the way you’d reread a sentence you almost sent to the wrong person.
She settled on: Thinking of you.
Hope your week gets less crazy.
It wasn’t the message she’d wanted to send.
But she didn’t know how to say I’m worried the distance I’m feeling is real without sounding like she was testing him.
So she sent the safe version and waited for the reply she wasn’t sure would come.
His reply came twenty minutes later: Same.
Can’t wait to see you.
Let’s do something this weekend.
Warm.
Normal.
Slightly generic, the shape of a message from someone too tired to be specific.
She looked at it, set her phone down, and picked it right back up two seconds later to reread it, hoping a second pass would turn up something the first one missed.
She typed one more time: Everything okay on your end?
The reply took longer than the last one.
Yeah.
Just a heavy week.
Overflow at work, nothing serious.
Then, a beat later: Miss you though.
Miss you too.
She hit send and set the phone face-up beside her pillow, where she’d see it light up if he wrote again.
He didn’t.
She told herself that was fine.
People slept.
People had heavy weeks.
She’d had plenty of her own, and Robby had never once made her feel small for having them.
.
At his desk, Robby checked his phone one last time before packing up.
The missed call stared back at him from the notification log, the voicemail still marked unheard.
With a tap, it began to play.
“Hi, Robby, this is Carol Day — Jess’s mother.
I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time.
I’m coming into town next week and wanted to see if we could meet properly.
Give me a call when you get a chance.
I’ve heard a lot about you.
All of it interesting.”
The message was warm, direct, and slightly intimidating in the particular way mothers of girlfriends managed without trying.
A woman curious about him and not interested in hiding it.
The message ended.
He stared at the screen.
Jess’s mother.
The family tree.
The conversation the DNA test hadn’t bypassed after all, just postponed.
He put the phone in his pocket, locked his desk, and walked out into the cool LA night.
Tomorrow, he’d call her back.
Tonight, he was too tired to do anything except keep moving forward, one foot in front of the other, toward a home that would still be there whether or not he’d earned the rest.
The parking lot was empty except for his car and Marta’s, hers already gone, the space where it had been just a rectangle of paler asphalt.
He sat behind the wheel for a minute before starting the engine, running the voicemail back once in his head, all of it interesting, and telling himself Carol Day’s version of interesting probably meant something warmer than it sounded at eleven at night on no sleep.
Probably.
He’d call her tomorrow.
He’d read the message from Jess again, too, and answer it properly instead of on autopilot between folders.
Tonight the only thing he had left in the tank was the drive home and the hope that tomorrow’s version of him would be sharper than tonight’s.
hey — quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
every chapter the second i finish writing it.
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P.S.
— in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.