Am I the a**hole for pretending not to recognize her?
I (50M) work intake at a men’s and women’s emergency shelter downtown, and last Tuesday a woman came through my line who I used to work with for six years at Harmon & Delcourt – same floor, same department, lunch together twice a week for half a decade.
Her name is Deborah Voss. She was my supervisor until 2019.
She was better at that job than anyone I’ve ever worked with. Sharp, organized, the kind of person who remembered your kids’ names and the details of every case on her desk simultaneously. When she got promoted to senior director in 2018, half the floor threw her a party.
I don’t know what happened after that. I got laid off in early 2020 and lost touch with most of that world. So when she walked up to my desk last Tuesday with a plastic bag and a shelter referral from the church on Fifth, I genuinely didn’t recognize her at first.
Then she said her name for the form.
My stomach dropped.
She looked at the intake sheet, not at me. I don’t know if she recognized me or not. She was tired – the kind of tired that isn’t about sleep – and she answered every question in a flat, careful voice like she’d done this before.
I kept my face neutral. I processed her paperwork. I didn’t say her name out loud the way you do when you actually know someone. I just typed it in, printed her wristband, and told her to follow the yellow line to the women’s wing.
She never looked up.
Here’s where I might be the asshole: I have her old LinkedIn. It’s been inactive since 2021. I have mutual contacts who might know what happened, who might be able to help her – people with actual resources, not a cot and a meal ticket. I could reach out. I could tell someone who gives a shit.
I haven’t done anything. It’s been six days.
My friend Portia thinks I’m protecting Deborah’s dignity by staying quiet. My brother thinks I’m just protecting myself from an awkward conversation I don’t want to have.
She comes back every night. I’ve processed her checkout and check-in four times now. Every single time, she looks at the form and not at me.
Last night she came through my line again, and right before she took her wristband, she paused.
She looked up.
What Her Face Did
Not at me, exactly. More like through me, the way you look at something when you’re trying to decide if it’s real.
I held the wristband out. My hand was steady. I don’t know why I’m proud of that, but I am.
She took it. And then she said, “You look like someone I used to know.”
Not a question. Not an accusation. Just a statement, delivered in that same flat, careful voice. Like she was reporting a fact she hadn’t decided what to do with yet.
I said, “I get that a lot.”
She nodded once. Took her bag. Followed the yellow line.
I sat there for four minutes doing nothing before the next person came through. The guy behind me, Carl, who works the men’s side and has been here eleven years, said, “You okay?” and I said yeah and he didn’t ask again because Carl is smart enough to know when to leave it.
But I’m not okay. That’s the thing. I’ve been running that six-second exchange through my head for eighteen hours and I still don’t know what the right answer was.
What I Actually Know About Deborah Voss
She grew up in Milford. She told me that once over pad thai on a Wednesday, maybe 2016 or 2017. She had a sister who lived in Phoenix and a mother she visited every other Thanksgiving. She drove a gray Subaru and kept a plant on her desk that she named Gerald, which she thought was very funny and which, honestly, it kind of was.
She was the one who pushed back when they wanted to cut two positions from our unit in 2017. She sat in a meeting with the regional VP and made the case, point by point, and they kept both jobs. One of those jobs was mine.
She wasn’t sentimental about it. She never mentioned it again. That was just how she operated.
When I got laid off in January 2020, she sent me a LinkedIn message. Three sentences. Said I was one of the most reliable people she’d worked with, offered to be a reference, said she hoped things landed well for me. I thanked her. We didn’t talk after that.
I found work again by that June. Things did land well, more or less. I took the shelter job two years ago because the office work was making me feel like I was disappearing, which is a whole other story.
I have no idea what happened to her between 2020 and last Tuesday.
The LinkedIn profile still says Senior Director. The last post is from March 2021, some industry article she shared with a two-sentence comment. After that, nothing. The kind of silence that means either someone quit social media on purpose or their life stopped having things worth posting about.
The Thing My Brother Said
He didn’t say it to be cruel. That’s important context for him, because Gary says a lot of things and some of them land wrong but he’s usually trying to be honest, not mean.
He said, “You’re not protecting her. You’re protecting yourself from having to feel the thing you’d feel if you actually acknowledged what you’re seeing.”
I told him that was a very therapy-brained way of putting it.
He said, “Yeah, I’ve been in therapy. It helps. You should try it.”
I’ve been thinking about it since. The thing I’d feel if I acknowledged it. What is that, exactly.
Part of it is guilt, but not the obvious kind. Not guilt for being okay while she’s not, though that’s in there too. It’s more like. She saved my job once. She wrote me a reference. And now she’s sleeping in a shelter and checking in through my line and I’m sitting there pretending I don’t know her name, and what does that make me.
But here’s the other part, and this is the part I haven’t said out loud to anyone until right now: I’m scared that reaching out would make it worse for her. That being recognized, being seen by someone from before, would strip away whatever she’s built to get through the day. She’s got a system. The flat voice, the eyes on the form, the careful answers. She built that system for a reason.
Who am I to blow it up because it would make me feel better to do something?
What Portia Said
Portia’s known me since we were both working food service in our twenties, so she’s allowed to be blunt and she usually is.
She said, “There’s a version of dignity that’s about being seen and a version that’s about being allowed to be invisible. You don’t know which one she needs.”
I said, “So do nothing?”
She said, “I didn’t say that. I said you don’t know.”
Then she said something that’s been sitting with me. She said, “The mutual contacts thing. That’s not nothing. You don’t have to make it about her knowing you know. You could just quietly find out if there’s someone in her corner who doesn’t know where she is.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. Pulling a thread without making her watch me pull it.
The problem is I don’t know who those contacts are anymore. The Harmon & Delcourt world scattered after 2020. People went to different firms, different cities, different industries. I have eleven mutual connections on LinkedIn, and half of them I haven’t spoken to in four years. I don’t know who’s still close to her. I don’t know who would help versus who would make it weird, or worse, who would tell someone she wouldn’t want told.
That’s the thing about trying to help people who haven’t asked for help. You can do real damage if you pick the wrong lever.
Six Days of Doing Nothing
Here’s what I’ve actually done in six days:
I’ve processed her check-in and checkout four times. I’ve kept my face neutral every single time. I’ve said “follow the yellow line” and “have a good night” and once, when she dropped her bag near my desk, I said “here you go” when I handed it back.
I looked up our shelter’s case management resources and whether she’s been assigned a worker. She has. Her worker is a woman named Trudy who has been here longer than Carl and who is, by every measure I’ve seen, good at her job. So there’s that. Someone is supposed to be working on next steps with her. That’s the system doing what it’s supposed to do.
I’ve also looked at her LinkedIn eleven times. I’m not proud of that number but it’s the honest one.
And I’ve written and deleted two messages to a guy named Phil Garner, who used to be two floors above us at Harmon & Delcourt and who I think was genuinely friends with Deborah, not just work-friends. Both times I got to the second sentence and stopped. Because what do I say. “Hey, haven’t talked in four years, just wanted to let you know your friend is at a shelter.” I don’t know how to write that message in a way that doesn’t feel like a grenade.
What She Looked Like Before She Walked Away
Tired, like I said. But not broken. That’s the distinction I keep coming back to.
There’s a thing you see sometimes in intake, where someone has been through enough that they’ve gone somewhere behind their eyes. Checked out. Deborah hasn’t done that. She’s still there, still sharp, still doing the math on every interaction before she commits to it.
She looked up at me last night because she decided to. That was a choice she made. And what she said, “you look like someone I used to know,” that wasn’t confusion. That was a woman giving me a door and watching to see what I’d do with it.
I said I get that a lot. I closed the door.
Maybe that was right. Maybe that was cowardice. I’ve been a 50-year-old man for three years now and I still can’t always tell the difference.
What I know is this: she comes back every night. Which means she’ll come through my line again tonight, and tomorrow night, and however many nights after that until Trudy finds her something more stable. And every time, I’ll have to decide again.
The wristband. The yellow line. The thing I do or don’t say.
She took the wristband last night and she walked away and I watched her follow the line toward the women’s wing and I thought about Gerald the desk plant and the pad thai and the meeting with the regional VP in 2017 where she kept my job without ever mentioning it again.
Then Carl asked if I was okay and I said yeah.
Tonight she’ll come through my line at 7:30, give or take. I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do differently.
I still don’t know.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it on to someone who’d sit with it too.
For more stories about difficult public confrontations and their aftermath, read about what happened when one mom pulled her son out of a program in front of everyone or when one woman stood up in front of sixty people at Sunday Service and said what she saw. And for another story about a hard decision made at a shelter, check out this story about a volunteer who made a call she can’t take back.
