“And yet you are paying her full-time?”
She thought about it and said, “Yes, I guess I am. And that needs to stop too.” She hopped to her feet and paced again. “I think I felt sorry for her.”
“Uh-huh,” Nico said. “That works for a lot of people.”
“What? Feeling sorry for somebody? She’s done a good job since I’ve had her here. It’s not like I’ve regretted hiring her. But I don’t need anybody for as much work anymore. A few weeks ago I decided I only wanted somebody in the house half time, so she was taking work back home again.”
“But what kind of work?”
“Contacting other activists, dealing with all the emails, dealing with the publications and the government crap that seems to never end,” she said. “But, if I go to just writing, then I can get rid of all that in my life. … And it’s a huge headache honestly.”
“But you have a huge following for your activism.”
“Sure,” she said. “But it’s not me, it’s the whole group. If I were to step out, there wouldn’t be an issue.”
“Whole group?”
She looked from one to the other, as they both stared at her in confusion. “Well, it’s not just me who goes and does all this. There’s a group of us. The GA group.” They immediately wrote this down. “It stands for Global Awareness,” she said. “Four of us are leaders. We had to replace two others, our right-hand guys essentially, and I guess I’ll be the third. But others are stepping into our places.”
“The names, please.”
She quickly gave him the names of the main players. “There’s Steve Darwin, although he’s backed out for health reasons. There’s Hank Mullins and Midge. Midge—” She hesitated. “Midge Hennessy, I think.”
“And you’re the fourth?”
“Yes.” Then she leaned forward and tapped the pad of paper. “And the two new ones are Michael Ruse, and I believe her name is Kat Simcoe. They replaced John and Sue. John Edwards and Sue … Carlson.” Again, with those names written down, she nodded and said, “So, if I step back, it’s really not a big deal.”
“So, when you say you have all this work that you’ve hired an assistant for, it’s mostly work for the GA group?”
She nodded. “I do a lot of the secretarial work for the group.”
“But you had hired this person, not the group?”
She frowned and nodded. “Yes. I did that to make my work easier so I could write. But it’s not enough,” she cried out in frustration. “I still don’t get enough time to write.”
“So who would take over the secretarial work if you step out of the picture?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s really not my issue. I can hand it over to whomever is willing to take it over.”
“But then your assistant won’t have a job at all, right?”
“Probably not.” She dropped her face into her hands. “Honestly, I didn’t even think about this when I hired her. I was trying to replace my assistant. A big stack of work had built up. I wasn’t even thinking down the road, but, after these last few days, I don’t want to be doing this anymore. And that means I’m stepping back,” she said firmly. “That decision is now made, and that means I have to let go of my assistant sometime in the next little while, but first I need to hand over the paperwork jobs to the new secretary.”
“Who hasn’t been picked yet, correct?”
She nodded. “That person hasn’t been chosen because nobody knows that I’m stepping back.”
“Most would say it’s understandable after what you’ve been through.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But they’re all fairly fanatical. I wasn’t really even thinking about stepping back, but I noticed that I had been distancing myself a lot in the last six months to a year. Handing off a lot of stuff to my assistant, happy to pay somebody else to deal with it. It hasn’t changed my beliefs at all, but one can keep doing only so much on this before it impacts the rest of your world, and I really, really want to get back to writing. Like I said, I think I can do a much better job reaching a wider audience through my books.”
“Okay,” Nico said. “How many of these people have been in your house?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Well, none of them,” she said. “Or they’d have been on that other list.”
“So have you met any of these other people in the group?”
She nodded. “Oh, absolutely. Lots of them. But all at events. I feel like I haven’t explained this very clearly to you.” And even that seemed to come out more garbled than she was expecting. “I must be more tired than I thought.”
“I’ll put it down to tiredness,” Nico said. “And maybe, instead of that coffee, you should go lie down.”
She stared at him, but even her eyes were starting to blur. “I’ll lie down on the couch,” she said. “Just have a nap and see if I can hit refresh on my brain.”
“That sounds like a good idea. We’ll keep working on the names you gave us.”
She nodded, stood, picked up her coffee, and went into her living room. Her house had an open layout concept, and the change in flooring showed where the living room was. She had a gas fireplace and two couches on either side with a coffee table in the middle. She placed her cup down and snagged one of the folded blankets over the back of the couch and stretched out there. Then she pulled on the blanket and tucked it up to her chin. She closed her eyes and tried to rest.
She’d been with this GA group for a good eight years or so. She couldn’t see any
