Waving good morning at a colleague, Shelly drops her bag on the table. Smiling, she opens her laptop and punches the flashing button on her desk phone, ready to begin. “Who knew one retirement would make such a difference around here?” she thinks. “I should have fired him years ago.”

Edith is an uprooted southerner living in the midwestern US, where people talk too quickly and rivers move too slowly, but otherwise it’s a nice place to live.