I blinked. “That’s it?”
“That place never appreciated you.”
“You don’t even know the whole story.”
“I know my daughter. I know what tired sounds like. You’ve sounded tired for three years.”
My throat tightened in a way I did not expect.
“Mom there?”
“She’s pretending not to listen from the other room.”
“I heard that,” my mother called faintly.
I laughed.
Dad said, “Sunday dinner?”
“I can come.”
“Pot roast.”
“You’re bribing me.”
“I’m parenting.”
After we hung up, I sat quietly for a while. The apartment hummed around me. The phone buzzed again and again, but the sound seemed farther away.
By Saturday morning, the calls stopped.
That was almost more unsettling.
No calls before nine. None before ten. I made coffee slowly, waiting without admitting I was waiting. Around 10:17, my phone lit up.
Lawrence Morrison.
Not Keith.
Not HR.
The CTO.
I let it ring twice.
Then I answered.
“Good morning, Lawrence.”
There was a brief pause, like he had not expected me to pick up.
“Theodora,” he said, and his voice was careful in a way Keith’s had never been careful. “Thank you for answering.”
I sat down at the kitchen table.
“How can I help you?”
He exhaled once.
“I’ll be direct. Yesterday we had multiple service interruptions affecting several major clients. The team has spent the last eighteen hours trying to understand why certain automated safeguards are no longer active.”
I said nothing.
“I’m told you built those safeguards.”
“I built several tools to improve reliability.”
“And they stopped running after your resignation.”
“The core systems remain operational. Company code remains in the repository. Anything officially documented is available to your team.”
Another pause.
“Theodora,” he said, quieter now, “I need you to understand something before we go any further.”
I looked at the row of sunlight across my kitchen table, at the unopened boxes still stacked by the wall, at the phone in my hand that had finally stopped buzzing because the person on the other end had decided to speak plainly.