Teacher's Delight

Chapter Seven Zarina

She called the drilling contractor before she called Afisa, because the drilling contractor was a problem with a shape she could hold, and she wanted at least one solved thing in hand before she picked up the phone to a conversation she suspected would not stay as contained as Tuesday's had.

The contractor agreed to push the second borehole site back nine days, not the two weeks she'd hoped for, but workable, if — and there was always an if — someone qualified could requalify the water table survey in the meantime. She had Chinedu's field notes.

She had, more usefully, eighteen months of pattern recognition about how the aquifer behaved across their existing sites, which meant she could build a defensible interim survey herself, remotely, if someone on the ground could take the physical measurements and text her the readings.

She called Afisa with that plan already assembled, proud of it in the specific, slightly defensive way she got proud of solutions built at speed, and got exactly four sentences into presenting it before her sister cut her off.

"I can't do the ground measurements, Zarina."

"I wasn't asking you to. I was going to call Yusuf, he's done fieldwork before—"

"That's not what I mean." Afisa's voice had a flatness to it that Zarina recognized and didn't like, the sound of someone who'd rehearsed a sentence several times before saying it out loud. "I mean I can't keep doing this. Not the borehole thing specifically. The whole shape of it."

Zarina sat down on the edge of her bed, laptop still open on her knees, cursor blinking in an email she'd been drafting to Yusuf. "Say more."

"I got offered a promotion." Afisa said it like a confession rather than good news, which told Zarina everything about how this conversation was going to go before another word landed. "Senior analyst. More money, more hours, a team under me for the first time. I want it. I've wanted something like it for two years and I have been too busy doing unpaid procurement work for our company at eleven at night to even update my resume properly, and now it's actually here and I don't know how to say yes to it without also saying I can't keep giving you three hours a night."

"Afisa—"

"Let me finish, because if I stop I won't say the rest of it." A breath, audible even across the distance. "I'm not trying to take anything away from Amara Grid. I believe in it. I believe in it more than I believe in almost anything, which is exactly the problem, because believing in it is how I ended up doing two full-time jobs and calling it help. I need it to actually be two jobs, split fairly, or I need to stop pretending I can keep doing both of ours."

Zarina closed the email to Yusuf without sending it. Outside her window, the last of the daylight was doing the thing it did this time of year, giving up early, going gray and then gone by five-thirty, and she watched it for a moment because looking at anything else felt like it might require a response she wasn't ready to give.

"What does fair look like," she asked, finally. "To you. Say it plainly, I won't get defensive."

"I don't fully know yet. That's the honest answer. But it's not this — it's not me being the person who finds out about a crisis the same day it happens and is expected to have bandwidth for it on top of a full workday, indefinitely, with no end date attached." Afisa's voice cracked very slightly on indefinitely, the first real c***k Zarina had heard in it in longer than she wanted to count. "I need there to be an end date. Or a real plan. Or — I don't know, Zarina, a version of this where I'm not the release valve every single time something breaks."

"There's a plan," Zarina said, too quickly, and heard how it sounded even as she said it — reflexive, defensive despite the promise thirty seconds earlier not to be. "There's the PhD track, if I—"

"If you take it, you'd be here. Physically. For years. Not managing this from a dorm room between problem sets, actually here, with real infrastructure behind you instead of two exhausted women improvising across a time difference." Afisa let that sit a moment. "I'm not telling you to take it. I know it's not that simple, I know what it would cost you to fold your whole life into one institution and one country's timeline. I'm telling you that every plan you've floated past me in the last six months has had an unspoken assumption baked into it, which is that I'll keep absorbing whatever doesn't fit, and I need you to actually see that assumption instead of just relying on it."

Zarina sat with that longer than was comfortable, because there was no version of arguing with it that didn't require pretending she hadn't, in fact, been relying on exactly that.

"I see it," she said eventually. Quietly. "I'm sorry it took you saying it out loud."

"I know you're sorry. I believe you're sorry. Sorry isn't actually the thing I need right now, though — I need a real conversation, not tonight, I don't have it in me tonight, but soon, about what this looks like if I take the promotion. What comes off my plate. What you're willing to change, not just apologize for."

"Soon," Zarina agreed. "This week."

"This week," Afisa repeated, like she was filing it as a promise rather than a hope. A pause, and then, softer, some of the flatness finally draining out of her voice: "Take the promotion conversation seriously when we have it. I'm not bluffing about needing something to give."

"I know you're not."

After they hung up, Zarina sat a long time in the half-dark of her room, laptop cooling on her knees, the borehole crisis technically contained and the larger one only just beginning to show its actual size — not a scheduling problem, not something nine days and a field engineer could fix, but a shape she'd been carefully not looking at directly for months, built out of every hour her sister had quietly absorbed so that Zarina could keep believing the whole operation ran on her competence alone.