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Chapter thirty-one

Safe

P oppy clicked the submit button on her latest transcript and set her headphones on the sunflower cushion beside her, sighing. That was another twenty bucks. A little here, a little there, dribs and drabs adding up to…not enough. And the transcript market was empty. Again.

She cast a guilty glance toward the kitchen, where her mother was washing the dishes.

Poppy had been working in the main house, covering her constant use of headphones by claiming she needed lo-fi music to keep from being distracted, but there was always the risk her mom would look over her shoulder.

And eventually, she was going to expect another novel for her shelf, one with Poppy’s name in the acknowledgments.

She had all her old working files saved on her hard drive—hadn’t wanted to get rid of them, not even the ones that were Brendan’s, just because she liked being able to pick up a published book, compare it to the notes she’d left, and think, I did that .

Even though Brendan’s books, where she really had done that instead of just polishing, were no longer on her mom’s shelves but tucked away accruing value for some future book collector to buy.

So if she had to, she could pull up one of the Word docs with all the tracked changes not yet accepted and show it to her mom as fake proof of what she definitely wasn’t doing.

That would maybe buy time for them to not be on the brink of disaster.

But that was a problem for Tomorrow Poppy. Today Poppy was still keeping their heads above water, if barely. She was still moving. That was what mattered.

She had fallen back into the rhythm of transcript editing easily enough in the weeks since Rai had left.

A little slow at first, as she reacquainted herself with the shortcuts and hotkeys that she hadn’t used in a while, reviewed the style guides and standards, but she’d worked her way up to a reasonable pace now.

Just a couple of months ago, that pace had been enough to earn her a hair above minimum wage, which she’d been able to finagle into enough for subsistence as long as she worked extra hours.

But things had changed. When she’d first logged in to the contractor portal, there had been a good dozen messages in her inbox. She’d skipped over them in the moment, going straight to the marketplace to claim jobs before her resolve faded, but when she’d read them later, she’d been shocked.

Some of the messages were about changes to editing standards, and that was fine—she’d messed up a few in the first couple of jobs she’d done, but nothing too serious.

A few others were more worrying, though.

Changes in pay rates, new rules for partial jobs, little niggly things that might not mean much separately but in aggregate meant we are paying you less .

And since they had barely been paying enough to get by on in the first place, that was deeply concerning.

But the most concerning was the most recent.

The one that apologized to contracted editors for the lack of available jobs.

The language in the message was roundabout and positive, talking about new opportunities they intended to explore, but Poppy could read between the lines.

She hadn’t missed the fact that every company under the sun was touting their new AI features while Instagram was suddenly full of laid-off copywriters, editors, and artists looking for freelance work.

What the message was carefully not saying was that many clients who had once contracted for human-edited captions were now taking the cheaper route of AI-edited captions.

The captions weren’t as good—Poppy had seen plenty already—but a distressing number of companies had apparently decided they were good enough, given how very cheap they were.

And over the days that followed, Poppy could feel the truth of how her once-reliable contract job was being chipped away .

She could get jobs, if she haunted the market at the usual drop times, but they were scarcer even than they’d been in the days before…

before. And the rates were sickeningly low.

She wasn’t even making Arizona’s minimum wage now, not if she took the time to do a halfway decent job, and she was starting to worry that she wouldn’t even be making the ridiculous federal minimum wage, the way things were deteriorating.

The only way she could make enough money for their expenses was to haunt the market every moment she wasn’t actively transcribing, waiting for jobs to trickle in and snatching them as fast as she could, even if they were things she hated, like calculus lectures and political opinions that made her stomach hurt.

And the need to be scraping the market constantly meant that she couldn’t even meaningfully look for other work, other than hastily posting her editing rates on her Instagram.

It had been weeks now, and she hadn’t had a single nibble, whether because of her lack of reach or because Brendan’s slander had spread further than she’d known.

She’d even taken one night of an especially empty market to feverishly send applications to every business within a two-mile radius between market refreshes, thinking a part-time job might not leave her mom alone long enough to be a problem, but she hadn’t gotten any replies.

Nobody wanted her, not even to bag groceries.

Which she would honestly be amazing at. No cans on top of the bread, ever.

It was depressing. Soul-crushing. And the worst of it was knowing that she had chosen it. She had chosen to have her soul crushed rather than…flying.

It had been the right choice. The smart choice, the safe choice.

She knew it. She knew if she’d gone with Rai and left her mother behind, it would have been a disaster.

And she knew that if he had stayed, he would be dead by now, all his exuberance and vitality gone forever.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t grieve what she could never have, couldn’t wistfully remember all of his faces, that smile, the flying. Wonder where he was flying now.

Except then she also had to remember his expression when she’d sent him away.

I love you , he’d said, and she’d thrown it back in his face.

And while in the moment she had been full of rage, rage on behalf of her mother and her own sense of betrayal, now she just felt sad.

Sad that she’d hurt a man whose greatest sin had been wanting her to be happy.

He’d gone about it the wrong way, yeah, but his intentions had been good.

Pure. He had acted entirely without malice, even when he was riding his storms, which was the rarest thing she could imagine.

She couldn’t say the same for herself, could she?

Some days she thought she was nothing but a bundle of resentment, trauma, and pettiness wrapped in a trenchcoat, like a passel of rabid ferrets.

Not to mention the way she’d freaked out at the tiniest bit of kindly meant critique, like a freshman in Art 101.

She hadn’t been so fragile when she was actually in college.

Hell, back before she’d let Brendan’s abuse eat away at the roots of her confidence, she’d had teachers telling her she should quit art forever, and she’d just laughed and painted more boldly.

Now she had a Fedora of Fragility to go with her Trenchcoat of Trauma.

Which was why it never would have worked. She was still too broken, her heart too muddy for all that purity. Rai deserved better. Someone who could love him back with the same single-mindedness, the same joy. Not her sad, wilted excuse for love.

It was better for everyone that he’d moved on.

She told herself that a hundred times a day.

She refreshed the market a few more times, but it was still empty, empty, empty, and she just…couldn’t do it anymore. She had to get out, just for an hour.

She left her laptop on the couch and headed to the kitchen, leaning against the doorway and watching her mother for a moment.

It was a good day, from what she could tell—her mom was moving freely, relaxed and content.

She had her housework playlist on, which meant Ramones, another good sign.

It helped that there hadn’t been many stressors of late; they hadn’t had another storm since the tree had fallen on their house, the roof damage had indeed been covered under their insurance, and Poppy had been spending most of her time since in the sunflower living room, being conspicuously healthy and falsely happy.

And while it was blazingly hot all the time, right now it was late enough in the day that a walk wouldn’t set her mom worrying about heat stroke, as long as she came back quickly enough. She could go for a walk.

Satisfied, she moved into her mother’s field of vision. “Are we wanting to be sedated today, or do we not wanna be buried in a pet sematary?” She gestured at the speaker. Normally she could differentiate the songs fine, but her mind was too tangled right now to do more than recognize the band.

“We’re not wanting to go down to the basement,” her mom replied, sending her a smile. “How’s the book coming along?”

“Slowly,” Poppy said. “I need to take a break. Did you need anything from the store, or…?” She tried not to hold her breath waiting for a response.

The bank account was low again. She still had some of Rai’s wad of cash left, and she knew she could spend it if she had to, but she was trying not to, trying to live off just what she earned each week.

It felt wrong to spend Rai’s money when the painting he’d paid for was still sitting in her studio .