Enabler. She wills herself to see the best in people because she can’t handle conflict. And she won’t admit the impotence that we real child protection workers feel when we have to obey the fucking “rules”—which serve no one, especially not the children whose needs aren’t being met. She sets the bar so low and refuses to see it. I stare out the window and say nothing.

The rest of day passes at the steady pace of paperwork and doleful phone calls. I have more than twenty files on my caseload, some of them reported incidents, others active investigations. That’s a whole crowd of children I’m desperately trying to save. As I sift through the voice mails left on my machine—most of them from bio parents, a lot of them incoherent or hateful—I think about all the gates I’m guarding for these kids and how none of them really know it’s me.

By four o’clock, I’m happy to start the walk home to the loft. When I step inside the apartment, I see Chase standing in boxers and a yellow shirt with the collar up, dicing tomatoes. He turns when he hears me.

“Hey, beautiful,” he says, the paring knife still in his hand. In the living room the baseball game is on, scores from around the league zooming across the ticker. “Everything okay?”

He always asks me that. But how can everything be okay? To be fair, he hasn’t seen what I’ve seen today. He doesn’t know what I know. The bulge of Buster’s diaper. The press of his small face into couch cushions. The utter apathy of his parents. Chase’s world is much brighter than that. It’s a good thing. And his brightness buoys me. It’s what I love most about him.

I smile. “Most things are fine.”

“Tough day?” He rinses his hands and then grabs me a wineglass from the cupboard, fetches a chilled bottle of white from the fridge. “I don’t know how you do it. You could have gotten a job in a coffee shop, you know. Just deal with caffeinating people all day.”

I laugh a little every time he makes suggestions like this, although I’m not sure he’s actually joking.

“How was your day?” I sit on the chrome barstool at the kitchen counter and pry off my sneakers, letting each one drop with a thud. “You got in late last night. How was the photo shoot? Where did you go again?”