2. July 22, 2021

Zoom has fun­da­men­tal­ly trans­formed since the start of Covid-19, evolv­ing from a glitchy com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool into an essen­tial app with sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­nol­o­gy and pro­duc­tion qual­i­ty. Hol­ly Gib­ney reflects on this progress while attend­ing a Zoom funer­al for a loved one, where she choos­es to keep her cam­era off due to her deeply pri­vate nature. After the ser­vice, she declines a call from Bar­bara Robin­son but even­tu­al­ly answers, reveal­ing her strug­gle to cope with the cur­rent state of the world and her per­son­al grief.

Hol­ly is deeply affect­ed by the pan­dem­ic and the loss of her Uncle Hen­ry, who sur­pris­ing­ly sur­vives a Covid out­break in his nurs­ing home thanks to being vac­ci­nat­ed, unlike Hol­ly’s moth­er, Char­lotte, who dies after refus­ing vac­ci­na­tion and attend­ing an anti-mask ral­ly. This loss plunges Hol­ly into a deep mourn­ing peri­od, com­pound­ed by her dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ship with her moth­er. Despite the emo­tion­al tur­moil, Hol­ly can­not detach from her inves­tiga­tive work, as evi­dent when she responds to a plea for help regard­ing a miss­ing per­son, Bon­nie Dahl, fur­ther illus­trat­ing Holly’s com­mit­ment even in the face of per­son­al despair.

Hol­ly’s con­ver­sa­tion with Pete Hunt­ley, her busi­ness part­ner who is also suf­fer­ing from a mild case of Covid, demon­strates their ded­i­ca­tion to their work as detec­tives. Despite Pete’s advice to post­pone tak­ing on any new cas­es, Hol­ly finds her­self com­pelled to delve into Bon­nie Dahl’s dis­ap­pear­ance after hear­ing the dis­tress in her moth­er’s mes­sages, dri­ven by a pro­fes­sion­al oblig­a­tion and a per­son­al res­o­nance with the plea for help.

The chap­ter por­trays Hol­ly’s inter­nal con­flict, caught between her grief and her instinct to help oth­ers, even as she deals with the com­plex­i­ties of loss and the ever-present shad­ow of the pan­dem­ic. Holly’s deci­sion to meet with Bonnie’s moth­er, despite her own vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, under­scores her pro­found sense of duty and com­pas­sion. The nar­ra­tive also touch­es on themes of tech­no­log­i­cal depen­dence, the impact of the pan­dem­ic on per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives, and the human abil­i­ty to per­sist in the face of adver­si­ty.