(Disclaimer: Not. Mine. Okay? Good.)
(Note: This is for all intents and purposes, finished. Don't ask me for an update.)
I'd like to know where she got the idea that what she does is not enough. That she doesn't give enough to this thing we call a job. If it was a person who gave her that idea, they need to be taken out back and shot.
Up until this year, we used to work most holidays together. Neither one of us had anyone to go home to. Psychopaths don't take holidays – someone has to be around. Why not us? Why should a couple of the guys with families be stuck staring at the phone and digging through dusty files, when they could be at home?
She worked holidays because she'd work twenty-four hours a day, if she could. She said she'd always worked holidays. Started out of necessity when she was a rookie beat cop, she told me, once. She had student loans and needed the extra money she'd get from working what should have been a holiday. And it just became habit.
She'd never had anyone to go home to, in the first place. No one to celebrate with. Even when her mother was alive, she didn't take a holiday off. She said it wasn't worth it.
But this year's different. A couple of new rookies are there, watching the phone. She's home with me. She finally takes a couple of days off – and she's thinking about work. About how she's not doing enough.