Chapter 4
Mave scrambled to pick up the bundle. It was heavy. Too heavy. She didn’t need to count it to know how much was there. Her brain short-circuited.
“Wait,” she called out, abandoning the counter and rushing toward the door.
Gideon paused with his hand on the heavy metal handle. He looked back at her over his shoulder.
“I can’t take this,” she stammered, holding the money out to him. “I don’t even know your name. I can’t pay this back. I don’t do whatever it is you think I’ll do for this.”
A faint, grim ghost of a smile touched the corner of Gideon’s mouth. It didn’t reach his eyes.
“You don’t owe me a thing, Mave. The debt is paid.”
He pushed the door open, stepped out into the freezing rain, and vanished into the darkness of the city.
Mave stood paralyzed in the entryway, the neon light buzzing above her head. She looked down at the money in her hand. Tucked beneath the rubber band was a square white napkin from the diner. She pulled it out. Written in sharp, elegant black ink were four words:
*Ben’s debt is paid.*
She stood in the humming diner, holding her salvation in one hand and the terrifying reality of a stranger’s power in the other, and went completely silent.
The hundred-dollar bills felt radioactive against her skin. Mave wrapped the thick bundle in a plastic grocery bag, taped it tight with electrical tape, and shoved it deep into the inside pocket of her winter coat. She kept her hand pressed against it the entire bus ride out to the suburbs.
It was Friday morning. The rain had cleared, leaving behind a brittle, bone-chilling cold that turned the city sidewalks white with frost. Mave didn’t go to her apartment. She didn’t trust the flimsy lock on her door. Instead, she rode the transit line all the way to the end, getting off at a strip mall that housed a small independent bank.
She walked up to the teller window, her hands shaking as she unwrapped the plastic bag. She counted it right there on the faux marble counter.
Ten thousand dollars.
Exactly one hundred crisp, consecutive bills. He had given her two thousand more than she had lost.
“I need a cashier’s check,” Mave told the teller. Her voice was flat. “Made out to Oak Creek Assisted Living.”
The teller, a young woman with a bored expression, paused. She looked at Mave’s frayed sweater, the exhaustion carving dark crescents under her eyes, and then at the neat stack of high-denomination currency. Suspicion flickered in the teller’s gaze.
Mave leveled a look at her that possessed none of the timidness she usually carried. It was a look forged in the desperate, ugly hours of the previous night.
“Please,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. Flat and unyielding. “Just print the check.”
Twenty minutes later, Mave pushed through the heavy glass doors of Oak Creek. The facility smelled exactly as it always did — a cloying mix of lemon bleach, pureed peas, and impending grief. It was clean, well-staffed, and staggeringly expensive.
She bypassed the receptionist and walked directly into the administrator’s office. Mrs. Higgins looked up over her reading glasses, a practiced look of synthetic sympathy already forming on her face.
“Mave, dear. I was just about to call you. The grace period ends on Monday. If the account isn’t brought current — ”
Mave dropped the cashier’s check onto the polished mahogany desk. The slip of paper made a soft, definitive sound.
Mrs. Higgins stopped talking. She picked up the check, her eyes widening slightly at the amount. It covered the missing eight thousand plus next month’s tuition in advance.
“I see. Well, this is — unexpected. Your ex-boyfriend came through?”
“Something like that,” Mave lied.
Her stomach twisted into a cold, hard knot. The lie tasted like ash. She turned on her heel and walked out before the administrator could ask another question.
Chloe’s room was at the end of the second-floor hallway. Mave paused outside the door, taking a deep breath, forcing the tension out of her shoulders. She pasted a warm smile on her face and pushed the door open.
Her younger sister was sitting by the window in her specialized wheelchair. Chloe was nineteen, but the traumatic brain injury from a hit-and-run driver three years ago had trapped her in a fragmented reality. Her dark hair was braided neatly down her back. She was staring intently at a flock of sparrows picking at the frost on the lawn.
“Hey, Bug,” Mave said softly.
Chloe didn’t turn her head, but her fingers twitched against the armrest. “The birds are cold. They don’t have coats. They have feathers.”
“It’s freezing.” Mave pulled up a vinyl chair next to her sister. She took Chloe’s pale, thin hand in hers, rubbing her thumb over her sister’s knuckles, trying to generate some warmth.
“Ben didn’t come,” Chloe said abruptly. Her speech was slow, slightly slurred. “He promised to bring the blue candies.”
Mave felt a spike of pure, unadulterated hatred for the man she had lived with for two years. She swallowed it down.
“Ben had to go away for a while, Bug. For work. He won’t be coming by anymore.”
Chloe turned her head, her bright, unfocused blue eyes locking onto Mave’s face. She stared for a long, uncomfortable moment, dissecting the micro-expressions Mave was trying to hide.
“You’re sad. You have the sad lines around your mouth.”
“I’m just tired,” Mave whispered, leaning forward and resting her forehead against her sister’s shoulder.
The smell of Chloe’s lavender shampoo was the only thing anchoring her to reality. She had done it. Chloe was safe. The room was paid for.
But as she sat there in the sterile quiet of the facility, the image of the man in the diner — the dark tailored overcoat, the cold precision in his eyes, the casual way he dismissed a fortune — burned into her mind.
*The debt is paid.*
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Men like that didn’t pay debts out of charity. They bought leverage. They bought ownership.
Mave closed her eyes. A cold sweat broke out along her hairline. She had saved her sister. But she had a sinking, terrifying suspicion that she had just mortgaged her own soul to do it.
