▸ Column · Modern grounded Gotham — a thief and a vigilante reading a small-practice office manager's letter
CATWOMAN replies.
The letter
I've run the front office of a little family orthodontics practice in my old Gotham neighborhood for eleven years. Last month a big staffing outfit offered me nearly double the money and the chance to work from home. Trouble is, Dr. Vance — she's 67, and genuinely kind — keeps telling me she doesn't understand the billing system, that the two girls I trained at the desk would "come apart" without me, and that she'd have to shutter the place if I left before she retires "in a few years." She's been saying "a few years" since before I paid off my student loans, which I finally just did. This is a real step up, not a sideways shuffle. My husband says her staffing mess isn't mine to fix, but half my family are patients here and I grew up three blocks away, so it isn't that clean. Is my guilt a real reason to stay, or am I being managed — even without her meaning to — into shelving my own life forever?
Catwoman replies
Sugar, let's find the lock first. She's holding one key, and it isn't billing software — it's your hometown, your family in her waiting room, and that warm little word "guilt." Notice she never offers you a raise or a retirement date in writing. She offers you "a few years," which in my experience is what people say when they want the leash long enough that you stop feeling it.
I've watched the kind, the lovely, the never-meant-it-that-way pick more pockets than the Penguin ever did, and they do it with a soft voice so you blame yourself for noticing. She isn't a villain. She's just decided your future is a line item in hers.
So take the take. Double the money, your own door — that's not a lateral move, that's freedom with a paycheck. Decline to be her getaway car out of retirement she's never going to schedule.
I'll grant you this much grace, since you grew up three blocks over: leave the desk a clean map of how everything works before you walk. Not because you owe her the staying. Because cats land soft, and so should you. Then go. The key was always yours.
— Catwoman
Batman weighs in
Selina makes it sound like one clean leap. It isn't.
Take the offer. But the guilt isn't a leash — it's information. You built that office. Walking out the door tonight to spite the manipulation leaves two people you trained exposed and patients who are your blood without records.
Set a date. Thirty days. Document the billing system in full. Train a successor against that deadline, not hers. Then leave on terms you wrote.
The practice surviving is not your obligation. Your own exit being clean is. Discipline, not vanishing. Vance counted on your guilt. Make her count on your thoroughness instead.
— Batman
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