▸ Column · Modern Gotham City — the letter-writer is a nurse at Gotham General living in the Narrows, her partner away in Blüdhaven caring for a degenerating parent
TWO-FACE replies.
Replied to by Two-Face, with a rebuttal from The Penguin.
The letter
Writing to you from somewhere I probably shouldn't admit to. I'm a pediatric nurse at Gotham General — licensed here, fourteen years of training I can't pick up and carry across the river. Fourteen months ago my partner went back to Blüdhaven to care for his mother, who has a degenerative neurological condition that only progresses. His sister has never materialized to share any of it. Every plan we make comes back as "once things settle," and things don't settle with this kind of illness — they worsen. I'm thirty-one, sleeping alone in a flat above the Narrows and falling asleep to a pixelated phone call. Is it cruel to tell the man I love I need some kind of horizon — even knowing he genuinely can't give me one — or am I letting an open-ended wait take back years I won't get?
Two-Face replies
The evidence is what it is. Fourteen months, one absent sister, a disease that trends one direction only. I know something about things that don't get better — I sat across a courtroom from my own ruin once, still believing the system had a remedy right up until it didn't.
Half of me — the half that still argues from principle — says you have no right to demand a verdict here. The docket is illness, not negligence. You don't subpoena a man whose hands are full at two in the morning.
The other half says you've already looked at the evidence and you know what it shows. You're just hoping someone tells you you're wrong.
"Once things settle." I know that sentence. Prosecutors used it. Surgeons used it. I heard it in my own head for a while, before I understood the institution was never going to make good on what it promised.
So I reduce it. Deadline, or no deadline. Two sides, clean as a coin. But here's what the coin is actually for right now — not to decide. To catch you. Watch which side you're praying for the second it's in the air.
You already know your verdict. You've known it for months. The coin just strips away the story you've been telling yourself about why you don't.
Two sides. One coin. No appeals.
— Two-Face
The Penguin weighs in
The coin-flipping lunatic wants you to gamble. How touchingly useless.
The problem, my dear, is not your timeline — it is the sister, who has calculated, not without a certain low cunning, that as long as you two agonize over what is "fair," she contributes nothing while you and your partner carry the entire freight. That is leverage she is actively deploying. Stop pretending otherwise.
The answer is professional care, properly contracted, presented to the sister as an itemized invoice. Her share, in writing. She pays, or she faces family consequences she will not enjoy for the remainder of her comfortable years. Money moves what sentiment cannot, old bird.
You do not flip a coin when someone has already stacked the table. Waugh-waugh.
— The Penguin
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