Chapter 2
ELLIE
I’m going to die tonight.
This wine is going to kill me.
It’s terrible — truly horrendous. It tastes like someone drowned a grape in a bottle of rubbing alcohol and then tried to cover up the crime by slapping a French-sounding name on the label.
But it’s four dollars a glass at Rosie’s, and four dollars is all I can afford to spend on anything that isn’t keeping me alive right now. So, I take another sip and pretend it’s a Pinot Noir from a vineyard where people wear linen and talk about tannins and earthy notes.
“You’re making that face again,” Maren says from across the table, her chin propped in her hand. She’s watching me the way she always does, like I’m a puzzle she’s two pieces away from solving.
“What face?”
“The ‘I’m fine’ face. The one where your mouth is smiling but your eyes haven’t caught up.” She takes a sip of her own wine and winces. She ordered the same thing I did out of solidarity — add it to the list of nine hundred reasons I love her. “Jesus. This is actually criminal.”
I laugh. It comes out thin, a little frayed at the edges, but real enough.
Maren Lavelle has been my best friend since our freshman year at Boston University, when she found me crying in the communal bathroom at two in the morning because my dad had called again asking for money I didn’t have.
She sat on the cool tiled floor with me for an hour and never once told me to stop. Just handed me toilet paper when I ran out of tissues and said, “Okay. What do we do now?”
She moved to Chicago a year before I did.
Got a job in nonprofit fundraising at first. Found a tiny apartment in Logan Square with a fire escape she uses as a balcony.
When I told her I was thinking about leaving Boston, she didn’t ask why.
She immediately sent me a bunch of apartment listings and said, “Pick one. When am I coming to help you move?”
That’s Maren. She doesn’t wait for you to ask for help. She shows up.
Right now, she’s showing up at a sticky table in a dive bar on the South Side. And I know she can tell something’s wrong because she’s been watching me wordlessly swirl my wine for five minutes, and Maren is keenly aware that a quiet Ellie is a dangerous sign.
“They came to my door again,” I say finally.
Maren’s glass pauses halfway to her mouth. She sets it down carefully.
“When?”
“Yesterday morning. Two of them. Different goons this time — not the ones from last month.” I press my thumb into the stem of my glass, focusing on the pressure because if I focus on anything else, I might cry, and I am not crying in Rosie’s on a Wednesday night.
“They know where I work. They showed up at Lincoln Elementary last week. Stood outside the gate during recess.”
“Ellie…”
“I know.”
“Did they?—”
“One of them grabbed my arm when I came out,” I confess.
Maren’s face goes still.
“Not hard. Just... enough. To make sure I understood. They can get to me anywhere.” I take a breath. “And then my principal called me in and asked why two men in a black SUV were parked outside the school. What was I supposed to say? So, I—” I stop. Swallow. “I resigned.”
The silence that follows is heavy. I can practically feel it pressing on my skin.
“You quit?” Maren’s voice is low. Careful. Not judging — never judging — but edged with worry.
“I couldn’t let them come near those kids, Mare. I couldn’t risk it.” My throat tightens. “Those are five-year-olds. They come in with their little backpacks and their missing teeth, and they trust me. I can’t be the reason?—”
“Hey.” Her hand covers mine across the table. “You did the right thing. You hear me? You protected those kids.”
I force out a broken laugh.
“Yeah. And now I’m unemployed with a five-hundred-thousand-dollar debt.” My voice shakes a little. “Well… Four hundred seventy-eight thousand, five hundred forty. If we’re being specific.”
Maren is quiet for a moment. She does this thing when she’s thinking hard where she presses her lips together and turns slightly to the left.
“Okay,” she finally starts. “I can get you some money. You know my family will help, El. I could call, ask if?—”
“No.”
“Just hear me?— ”
“Maren. No.” I pull my hand back gently. “I am not borrowing money from your family. I’m not dragging anyone else into this. My dad dragged me into it, and look where that got me.” The bitterness in my voice is jagged. I close my eyes for a second. “Sorry. I didn’t mean?—”
“You don’t have to apologize for being angry at your dead father, El. That’s, like, the most valid emotion on earth.”
A weight lifts from my chest. She always knows just what to say.
I should tell her the rest.
“I have an interview,” I reveal. “Friday.”
“For what?”
“A tutoring position. Live-in. Private family.” I trace a circle on the table with my fingertip. “The posting was on one of those nanny agency sites, but it’s for a teacher. A little girl, six years old. They want someone with an education background to homeschool her.”
“Live-in?” Maren raises an eyebrow. “Like, you’d live in their house?”
“It’s apparently a big house.”
“How big?”
“The listing said ‘estate.’”
Maren lets out a low whistle. “What’s the pay?”
I take a sip of the terrible wine. “Five times what I was making at Lincoln.”
Her eyes go wide. She leans forward. “Ellie. Five times?”
“I know.”
“That’s — do the math — that’s like?—”
“I’ve done the math.” I’ve done it seventeen times.
At that salary, I could clear the debt in under two years.
Two years, and then I’d be free . The word feels foreign.
Impossible. “But there were over two hundred applicants. I barely have any private tutoring experience. I’ve only been teaching for three years. I’m not going to get it. ”
“But you passed the first round.”
I nod. “I passed the first round.”
“So, you have a chance.”
I tilt my glass to catch the last dregs of poison. It doesn’t taste any better at the bottom.
“I have a chance.”
Concern flickers across Maren’s face. She opens her mouth, then stops.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just—” She turns her glass by the stem. “A live-in position. At an estate. For a family that can pay five times a teacher’s salary. That’s a different kind of money. And different kinds of money sometimes come with different kinds of problems.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you’re sitting here with a bruise on your arm from the last set of rich men’s problems, and I?—”
“It’s a tutoring job, Mare. I’d be teaching a six-year-old. Reading, math, finger painting. Whatever weirdness comes with the money, I can handle it.”
She stares at me for a long time. Then finally nods.
“Okay. But promise me something.”
“What?”
“If anything feels wrong — anything , El — you call me. You don’t rationalize it, you don’t tell yourself you need the money, you don’t convince yourself that suffering is the price of survival. You call me, and you leave.”
“I promise.”
She holds my gaze for one more beat. Then downs the rest of her wine with a grimace.
“God, this is awful.”
The hours pass. Maren orders us another round. We talk about her job, her annoying coworker Greg, who microwaves sardines in the break room, and her sister’s wedding planning drama. Normal things. Fluffy things. I know she does this on purpose, filling the air so I don’t have to.
But within the conversation, I feel it. The hum. That low-frequency anxiety that lives in my chest like a second heartbeat. Always there, always counting. Days until the next payment. Dollars in my account. Hours until everything goes wrong.
By 10:30 p.m., I’m yawning into my hand, and she’s checking her phone.
“You should go home,” she says. “You look exhausted.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I mean it in the most loving way possible. You look like a beautiful ghost.”
I smile. For real this time.
“I sold the car,” I blurt out.
Shit. Maren has a way of making me spill my shameful secrets. Or maybe it’s the cheap wine.
“What? Wh—” She pauses. The flicker of pain that crosses her face is there and gone in half a second, but I catch it. She knows what the car meant.
It was a 2013 Honda Civic with a dent in the back bumper and a radio that only worked on one side, but it was mine. The one thing I owned outright. Gone now, sent off to sate the wolves’ hunger for another few weeks.
“I’ll get an Uber,” I say, already pulling out my phone.
“Let me pay for it.”
“Mare—”
“It’s an Uber, not a kidney. Let me.”
I want to argue, but the truth is my bank account has forty-seven dollars in it, and I need to eat this week. So, I nod. She taps her phone a few times, and the car is on its way .
We hug outside the bar. She holds on for a beat longer than usual.
“You’re going to be okay,” she whispers against my hair. “You know that, right?”
I don’t know that. Not in the slightest.
Still, I nod again. “I know,” I say, entirely for her sake.
If there’s one thing I learned from my father, it was how to lie to people I care about.
He was the best liar I ever knew, and he loved me more than anything. Somehow, both of those things were true at the same time.
The Uber drops me off twenty minutes later in front of my building, a narrow, brown-bricked walk-up on a quiet street that smells like dryer sheets and old rain.
It’s not much, but it’s what I can afford after the car money and this month’s payment. Third floor, one bedroom, a kitchen where I can touch both walls if I stretch my arms wide.
The second I step out of the car, the hairs on my nape lift.
The street is completely silent.
No music from the first-floor apartment. No dog barking down the block. Even the streetlight on the corner is out, the one that usually buzzes loud enough to hear from my window.
A gulp snakes down my throat.
I try to ignore the sense of impending doom as I dig through my bag for my keys. Then I feel it.
A shift in the dark.
Not a sound. More a displacement, a disturbance of the air around me.
My fingers tighten around the strap of my purse.