That’s the whole job.” She was quiet a while.

“I’ll think about it.”

What Corwin had finally seen — too late to be proud of, but not too late to act on — was that Espe had been doing the hardest version of the job all along, invisibly, for free, on top of a full shift.

For six months she had run a one-woman social-services operation out of a one-bedroom apartment: coordinating with the outreach center, tracking the supply drops, managing the legal paperwork for her daughter’s protective order and custody case, budgeting a pension across three lives, keeping a traumatized young woman and a toddler fed and safe and moving forward.

That was logistics.

That was case management.