Page 6 of Smitty

“I hear you.” Lisa, my supervisor, sighed and leaned back in her chair. “But this is the third time you’ve asked for more time in the past month.”

“Because something isn’t right.”

“Suspecting something is wrong and being able to prove it are two different things.”

I hated it when she said things like that. Not because she was wrong. She wasn’t. Far from it. The system wasn’t built on gut feelings. It was built on facts, evidence, and paperwork, mountains and mountains of paperwork. But every instinct I had was screaming at me that ten-year-old Dylan Mercer was in some kind of trouble.

I just couldn’t prove it.

I’d seen the bruises, I’d heard the fear in his voice when he spoke about his father, and I’d felt the tension radiating off of both his parents whenever I did a wellness check. But there was always an excuse for everything.

Except for the time when he whispered, “I don’t want to go back to the basement.”

They didn’t have a basement. I’d checked three times. I’d even gone to the courthouse and looked over the property records. I’d pressed him to tell me what he was talking about, but he refused. So, I was stuck. I knew something was wrong, but I had no real evidence.

“He’s had two school transfers in two years,” I pleaded. “His attendance is getting worse, his grades have dropped, and every time I talk to him, he is more and more withdrawn.”

“Every welfare check has come back clean. You’ve said that yourself.”

“Yes, his parents seem great, especially his mother, but that doesn’t mean something isn’t wrong.”

Her expression softened as she muttered, “I know.”

That simple acknowledgment took some of the fight out of me. She knew, and that’s what made this job so damn hard. Most people thought social workers saw an abused or neglected child and swooped in to save the day. They didn’t see the impossible balancing act behind every decision we made. If you removed a child too quickly, without being positively sure, then you could destroy a family. If you wait too long, you could fail the very person you were trying to protect.

There was no perfect answer.

Only the one you could make with the information you had.

“We could’ve missed something.”

For a moment, neither of us spoke. I looked down at the file in my lap and sighed. I’d worked so hard to be sitting in this office. Years of classes, months and months of long nights studying, internships, and volunteer hours. An endless stream of professors, supervisors, and exams. I wanted this. I wanted to make a difference. To do that, I had to put in the work.

Then and now.

So many people slipped through the cracks because nobody bothered to look twice. I wanted to be the person who looked twice, the person who paid attention, and maybe, just maybe, it would be enough.

Sometimes it was.

Sometimes it wasn’t.

“Okay,” Lisa sighed. “We’ll give it another week. One week. That’s it. If nothing more comes up, we move forward.”

“Understood.”

“Let me know if you need any help with anything.”

“I will.”

I stood and started for the door, but stopped when she said, “Brooke… carrying every kid in this county on your shoulders isn’t part of your job description.”

“Yeah, I have a tough time remembering that.”

“Try harder.”

I nodded, then slipped out of her office. I went straight to my desk and started sifting through Dylan’s file. I had to make sure I hadn’t missed something. A comment or a detail buried somewhere in the notes. Something that would help me figure out what was going on with him.

I was completely absorbed in reading when a steaming cup of coffee appeared next to my keyboard. I looked up and found Gloria with one hand on her hip and the other wrapped around a cup of her own. “Looks like you could use one.”