After a Year of Silence novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Monday
On the first Monday in October, I stood at the front of the open floor with a coffee in my hand.
Forty people were looking at me.
Every one of them was there because I had asked, and nobody had been told to come.
It was a year to the day since a man walked in off a plane and took my hand.
I had been thinking about that since the alarm went off.
"Morning," I said. "Two items, and then you can go back to what you were doing."
The senior dispatcher raised his coffee cup.
The analyst I had hired in March was a team lead now, with her own desk and her own opinions.
She grinned at me from the front row.
Miles stood beside the window with his arms folded and a pen behind his ear.
"First item," I said. "The Walter Linwood Fund paid out its twelfth grant on Friday."
The room was quiet.
"A dispatcher's father was in the hospital for nine days. He had no leave left, and he asked nobody. A coworker saw his badge log at two in the morning and told me."
"That was me," the woman from accounts payable said. "You told me not to say it was you."
"I told everyone not to say."
"I'm saying."
People laughed.
"Second item," I said. "The all-hands is moving to Fridays."
A groan went up.
"It was Monday for twenty years," Miles said.
"It was Monday because a man came back on a Monday," I said. "That's over. Fridays."
The groan changed to cheering.
Nobody on that floor whispered anymore.
They said what they meant to my face, and I said what I meant to theirs.
A year ago that would have been a miracle.
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