The numbers make sense if I don't breathe too hard near them. Three jobs, four weeks, every dollar laid out on an inventory sheet like a ransom note in my own handwriting.
Night-shift janitor: four-twelve an hour. Weekend cashier at the gas station on Division: minimum wage plus tips from someone who mistakes my exhaustion for charm.
Tuesday and Thursday mornings at the laundromat—folding strangers' underwear for eleven dollars an hour, which is exactly what my dignity is worth on the open market.
I add the column twice. The total lands six hundred short of the surgeon's deposit, and my savings cover four hundred of that gap. Two hundred dollars and one more week of doubles.
The timeline the cardiologist gave me stretches to four weeks, and for the first time since my father's funeral, the math doesn't make me want to disassemble my own skeleton. My pen hovers over the total.
Then my phone rings, and the caller ID is Portland General, and the floor I've been carefully constructing under my feet dissolves like sugar in acid.
"Ms. Reed, this is Portland General with an update on your mother." The nurse's voice has that professional warmth they teach in a seminar—How to Ruin Someone's Life Without Raising Your Voice 101. "Her latest echocardiogram shows significant further deterioration."
"How significant?" My pen punctures the inventory sheet—a clean hole, right through the total.
"Dr. Kaplan has revised the surgical window. We're now looking at one to two weeks before intervention becomes high-risk." A practiced pause, calibrated to the millisecond. "The financial office will need deposit confirmation within days."
"Several days." I repeat it like pressing a bruise, and my free hand grips the table edge until the wood grain embosses my palm. She starts saying something about a financial counselor and I hang up before she finishes offering me a life raft made of paperwork.
The supply closet on the ninth floor has a lock that sticks and a fluorescent bulb that flickers at a migraine-inducing frequency. But it has a door, and right now a door is everything.
I pull it shut, press my back against the shelving unit until the metal brackets dig into my spine, and my knees hit the concrete.
The sound that comes out of me is small and ugly and belongs to someone I don't recognise—muffled against my palm, shoulders curling inward like my body is trying to build walls my brain can't.
Two weeks. Two hundred dollars was survivable. The full deposit in fourteen days is a number that belongs to people who winter as a verb.
I pull my phone out with fingers that won't cooperate and open the draft I saved at two a.m. months ago. High-Society Introductions. Exclusive, discreet, verified.
That's what the site calls it—introductions—like they're hosting a cocktail mixer and not auctioning women's virginity to the highest bidder.
My registration is still saved—measurements, photos, a verification confirming I've never been touched. My body mapped for purchase, clinical as a livestock catalogue with better lighting.
I scroll through it and my stomach folds in on itself. I filled this out at two a.m. with the detachment of someone writing their own autopsy report. On a supply-closet floor in daylight, the detachment is gone and every field reads like a verdict.
My thumb finds Submit and stops. My mother's voice plays behind my eyes—I didn't raise you to bankrupt yourself keeping me alive—and she's right. She raised me to be worth more than a price tag on a site that spells discretion with a trademark symbol.
But she also raised me while skipping her own medication so I could eat. There is no version of this math where pride covers the deposit.
"Well." The voice arrives before the perfume does—gardenia and something sharper underneath. "Isn't this pathetic."
Maya stands in the doorway, backlit like a magazine spread. Her blazer costs more than my monthly rent, and she wears it the way her mother wears contempt—effortlessly, like she was born in it.
I lock my phone so fast the screen blurs. My knees crack as I stand—better she hears bone than whatever was happening thirty seconds ago. "Wrong floor, Maya. HR is on six."
"I heard something interesting today." She steps inside and the closet shrinks by half. "Miles Wallace personally shut down employees harassing you. In the atrium. In front of everyone."
"He shut down workplace harassment." I keep my voice flat—the tone of someone discussing office policy, not a man whose scent I catalogued against my will. "It's practically an HR function."
"Is that what you're calling it?" Her smile is her mother's—porcelain over something serrated. "Because what I hear is the half-blood janitor figured out the fastest way up isn't the elevator. It's a Wallace brother's bed."
My molars lock together so hard my skull vibrates. "That's creative. Did you rehearse it, or is cruelty just the family talent?"
"I'm not being cruel, Bailee. I'm being accurate." She examines her nails, lacquered the colour of dried blood.
"No pack standing, no money, no bloodline worth passing on. But you do have that damaged-girl-with-the-mop-cart thing, and I see how it plays on men who confuse pity with attraction."
"I mopped a floor. He told people to stop harassing me. If that's seduction, your love life must be riveting."
"Stay away from Miles." The performance drops, and underneath it she's all Celeste—same surgical precision, same gift for locating the softest place to press.
"Stay away from all three of them. Whatever you think you're building, my mother will dismantle it. And she'll use your sick little human mother as the wrecking ball."
The air exits my lungs in one controlled exhale. My nails find my palms—old crescents, new pressure—and I hold her gaze long enough to count as defiance before dropping it just enough to count as defeat.
I pull the cart toward the door and she steps aside like touching me might be contagious. "Smart girl," she says, and her heels click down the corridor like a metronome.
The bathroom on seven has a deadbolt. I lock it, lean against the sink, and open the draft again. Mom’s face surfaces—her hand in mine, the heart monitor's small green mountain. Whatever you're calculating, stop.
Sorry, Mom. I'm done calculating.
I press Submit. The screen loads, confirms, thanks me for my registration in a font that has no business being that cheerful.
I stare at the confirmation until the letters swim, then wash my face one-handed, phone still gripped in the other like evidence I can't destroy. I push the door open—straight into a wall of chest that has no right being where a hallway should be.
The collision knocks the phone from my grip and it hits tile screen-up, skidding to a stop between his shoes—still lit, still open, the confirmation glowing under fluorescent light.
Blake Wallace looks down. His grey eyes track across the screen—the logo, registration confirmed, the name of a site that needs no explanation—and every molecule of blood in my body relocates to my feet.
His gaze lifts to my face and his expression doesn't change—not a flicker, not a crack—which is worse than any reaction I could have braced for. "That's mine." My voice comes out like someone stepped on it.
Blake picks up the phone. Looks at the screen once more, then at me.
________________