Chapter 2
While Grant sat alone in the restaurant’s VIP room counting the names of each accomplice, more than fifteen kilometers away on the western edge of suburban Savannah, Jolene Tab was pushing open the door of a small one-story house with a faded blue painted door.
She set the bag of things on the kitchen table.
Grandma Birdie sat in the wooden chair beside the stove, her hands resting on her lap, looking at the bag. Inside the bag were only two items—the two cheapest items Jolene had kept from the shop that afternoon.
The old woman looked at them, then looked up at her granddaughter’s face, and didn’t ask.
Grandma Birdie was seventy-eight years old, and she had lived long enough to know when not to ask.
Jolene didn’t sit down to rest. She washed her hands, dried them, then sat in front of the old sewing machine set in the corner of the kitchen. It was a foot-powered Singer, its black paint almost completely chipped away, its pedal creaking every time she pressed it.
It was the most valuable thing in this house, and also the only thing that kept the two of them alive from month to month.
Jolene took in clothing repairs for the neighbors around the area—stitching seams back together, replacing zippers, taking in waists, letting down hems. The money wasn’t much, but it was steady.
Tonight, she wasn’t repairing a customer’s clothes. She took a leftover piece of fabric from last week’s order—a soft ivory-white cotton—spread it across the table, and cut it along a small curve.
She was making a newborn shirt from leftover fabric because new fabric was something she couldn’t afford.
The sound of the sewing machine ran evenly through the kitchen.
Grandma Birdie sat still and listened for a while. Then she asked, her voice soft, as if she were asking about the weather:
“Did you see anyone out there?”
Jolene stopped the machine. One second. The pedal stopped creaking.
Then she pressed it again, her eyes lowered to the line of fabric.
“No, Grandma.”
Grandma Birdie nodded. “All right.”
Those two words—all right—she said in the voice of someone who knew her granddaughter was lying, but chose not to peel the lie open.
And Jolene knew her grandmother knew.
But neither of them said anything more.
In this house, silence wasn’t coldness. Silence was the way the two of them protected each other from things that speaking aloud wouldn’t change.
The next day, Jolene delivered the repaired clothes to a neighbor woman at the end of the road. The woman took the bag of clothes, checked through them, nodded with satisfaction, then handed over the money—a few small bills.
Jolene took them, folded them neatly, and put them into her shirt pocket.
The neighbor looked at Jolene’s rounded belly, stayed quiet for a moment, then asked:
“Where’s the baby’s father, child?”
Jolene looked straight into the woman’s eyes. “There isn’t one.”
The neighbor fell silent—not because she believed it, but because she understood that the answer was a closed door and she hadn’t been invited to step through it.
Jolene said thank you, turned around, and walked home.
On the way back, she passed a thrift shop. She had walked past that shop many times, but today she stopped.
In the display window was a wooden cradle—a used one. Its white paint yellowed slightly. Its legs a little curved, but still sturdy.
Jolene stood looking at the cradle through the glass. She looked at it for a long time. Her eyes moved from the side rail down to the legs. From the legs up to the small price tag stuck in the corner.
She calculated: the money she had just received for repairing the neighbor’s clothes, plus the money left in the tin box at home, minus Grandma Birdie’s medicine for this month, minus electricity, minus rice.
She finished calculating.
Then she walked away.
It wasn’t enough.
That night, Grandma Birdie went to bed early. Jolene sat alone at the kitchen table, opening the small hard-covered notebook where she recorded daily income and expenses.
She turned through page after page.
Income:
Money for repairing the clothes of the neighbor at the end of the road.
Money for mending a shirt for the old man at the three-way intersection.
Money for replacing a zipper for the woman who ran the grocery shop.
Arthritis medicine for Grandma Birdie.
Rice, cooking oil, electricity, water, soap.
And one line she had written separately at the bottom of the page, underlined:
Things for the baby.
There was no number beside that line yet because there was no money to write down.
Jolene closed the notebook, set the pen down, turned off the desk lamp. The kitchen went dark. Only a little street light still fell through the small window.
Jolene sat in the darkness, both hands resting on her belly. She felt the baby moving inside her—slow and light, like a child turning over in sleep.
She whispered, just loud enough for herself and the baby to hear:
“Mommy will manage. Mommy has never failed to manage.”
Her voice was calm, but in the darkness, no one saw her hand gripping the edge of the table, and no one knew how many times she had said that sentence to the child in her womb to remind herself that she could still stay on her feet.
May you like
And on the other side of the city, inside the Holloway mansion, Grant Holloway was lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about an incomplete list.
He didn’t know that fifteen kilometers away from him, the woman he was searching for was sitting in the dark, sewing clothes for their child out of leftover fabric, counting money coin by coin—and not waiting for him to come.
