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The incident with the stupid frog song this morning has affected me more emotionally than any quarterly budget projection ever has.

It feels deeply inconvenient. And something else I can’t pin down.

I answer two client messages before stopping halfway through a third because I suddenly don’t care enough about marketing analytics to pretend urgency anymore.

That thought alone almost makes me nauseous.

Work has always been the stable thing in my life.

The useful thing.

When Ben died, I worked longer hours.

When Maggie stopped answering calls regularly, I worked even harder.

When relationships failed or loneliness settled in too deeply or life felt too uncertain, I built tighter schedules, cleaner systems, and more dependable routines.

Work made sense to me because effort always produced results eventually. People rarely did.

Except lately, that feels less true than it used to.

I think about Lucy laughing and singing in the backseat of the SUV. About Maggie. About Briggs catching Bun before he hit the floor at the Riverbend, like saving him mattered. About Torin carrying Lucy upstairs so carefully last night so as not to wake her.

And about Ashby showing up before seven in the morning to help, simply because he knows I’m tired.

My chest aches unexpectedly.

Because somewhere along the way, my life has become less efficient but fuller.

And I don’t entirely know what to do with that.

Before I can overthink myself into another existential crisis, I grab my phone and call my boss.

Julian answers on the second ring.

“Laurel Sterling,” he says warmly. “I was beginning to think you’d started living feral in the woods.”

“Emotionally? Maybe.”

“That bad?”

I stare out the kitchen window at the rain sliding down the glass. “My sister’s still missing.”

His tone shifts immediately. “Right. Of course. Any updates?”

“Some. None of them good.”

A pause. “You don’t sound okay.”

The thing is, Julian has known me professionally for six years. He knows exactly how hard I push myself. Usually, he treats it like a mildly concerning weather pattern.

Today, he just sounds genuinely worried.

“I think,” I admit, “I’ve been pretending work can compensate for having an actual life.”

“Well,” he says carefully, “that’s either growth or a nervous breakdown.”

“Potentially both.”