Dr. Tessa's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

Tessa stood in front of seven potential donors in the center's conference room, her presentation slides glowing on the screen behind her. She'd practiced this pitch forty times. Her research data was solid. Her conservation center plans were thorough. But halfway through her third slide, she noticed the older man in the back checking his phone. The woman beside him stifled a yawn. Tessa talked faster, throwing in extra statistics about nesting patterns and migration routes. She showed photographs of rare species and charts tracking population decline. Nothing landed. When she finished, the silence stretched too long. One donor asked if bird conservation was "still relevant" compared to larger mammals. Another wanted to know if her center would attract tourists. They thanked her politely and left without making commitments. Nigel tapped three times on her shoulder. No, it hadn't worked. She sat alone in the empty room, staring at her laptop screen. All those emails, all that preparation, and she'd somehow made her life's work sound boring. The university interest suddenly felt fragile, like something that could disappear if she couldn't learn to make people care. She needed to clear her head. She grabbed her field bag and drove to the old waterbird site where the center had run expeditions three years ago. The rusted jeep still sat there, moss thick across its hood, vines wrapped around the wheels. Someone said they'd left field data in the glove box before the project got abandoned. Tessa pulled the door open and dug through wet papers and broken equipment. Nothing useful. Just more evidence of failed work, research that went nowhere because funding dried up. She slammed the door shut and kicked the tire, then immediately felt stupid for taking her anger out on a dead vehicle. The walk back toward her car took her past a log that had fallen across the path, its wood crumbling into pieces, ants crawling through the rot. Everything here showed what happened when projects died—nature took it all back. She thought about her cabin full of research notes and her museum display that three people had probably looked at. Her university emails felt like they'd come from someone else, someone confident who knew how to make people listen. Outside her cabin stood a topiary shaped like a hummingbird, its throat covered in pink-ruby flowers someone had carefully planted. She'd walked past it a hundred times and never really noticed how much work it took to maintain something that specific. How much effort went into keeping it from falling apart. She sat on her cabin steps and opened her laptop. The presentation file stared back at her, full of facts that apparently didn't matter to anyone but her. Nigel settled beside her and tapped once, twice, three times on her knee. No, she couldn't give up. But she also couldn't keep doing the same thing and expect different results. Her research was solid. Her data was real. She just hadn't figured out how to make anyone else feel what she felt when she watched birds. The university emails sat in her inbox, still waiting for follow-up. She closed the laptop and looked at the hummingbird topiary again, at all those careful flowers arranged just right. Maybe she needed to stop showing people charts and start showing them why any of this mattered in the first place.