Chapter 2
Freedom isn’t found in escape, but in the deliberate choice of which chains to wear.
I need a bandage. Maybe antibiotics. Definitely tetanus protection against whatever century-old bacteria lived on that Baccarat crystal. But the first aid kit—like everything else in this repurposed rectory—is perpetually empty. Budget cuts dressed up as “temporary resource allocation challenges.”
I swing my legs over the edge of the twin bed, careful not to disturb the privacy curtain separating me from Diane, who snores with the rhythmic intensity of a chainsaw orchestra.
The floor is cold against my bare feet. My finger throbs in harmony with my temples.
I am a walking percussion section of discomfort.
“You’re up early.” Lena’s voice carries the warmth of a tax audit as she pauses in the entrance of what this place calls a ‘bedroom’. Bedrooms have doors. There are no doors here. How would Lena pry into our tragic private lives if doors got in the way?
Lena Newton is the shelter’s nightshift guardian, queen of the sign-in sheet and sovereign ruler of the curfew clipboard. Last night she stood in the doorway like Cerberus with a bad perm, blocking my entrance despite Sister Margaret’s explicit permission to return late.
“I have your paperwork right here,” I told her, brandishing the note like it was the One Ring to rule them all.
“Sister forgets things,” Lena replied, her eyes narrowing with the satisfaction of someone who’s found a loophole in the Geneva Convention. “Rules are rules.”
Twenty minutes of doorstep diplomacy later, she’d relented—not from compassion but from the mathematical certainty that standing there meant postponing her 10:30 p.m. soap opera viewing schedule.
“Good morning to you too, Lena,” I murmur, reaching for yesterday’s jeans. “Love what you’ve done with your judgmental stare today. Very vintage disapproval.”
She doesn’t hear me.
Nobody does at 5:47 a.m. in a women’s shelter.
That’s the point.
The kitchen smells like burned coffee and institutional despair. I’m pouring myself a cup of what appears to be liquid asphalt when Sister Margaret materializes like a habit-wearing ninja.
“Emmaleen! Just the person I wanted to see.” Her smile is genuine, her eyes kind, her memory a sieve with holes the size of Texas.
Sister Margaret—Saint Forgetful to those of us who’ve learned to get everything in writing—means well.
She really does. Her arthritis-gnarled hands clutch a clipboard like it’s floating away, and her wire-rimmed glasses magnify eyes that have seen too much human suffering to ever fully process it all.
“I’ve made coffee,” she announces, gesturing to the cup in my hand.
The coffee is always lukewarm, the color of muddy creek water, and tastes like someone described coffee to an alien who then tried to recreate it using only pencil shavings and regret.
“Delicious,” I lie, because some chains you choose to wear willingly.
“I need to discuss something with you.” Her voice drops into that particular octave that social workers reserve for delivering bad news wrapped in bureaucratic necessity. “We have a mother with three children coming in three weeks from Monday. Priority case.”
I nod, the translation software in my brain converting her gentle phrasing: Your trauma isn’t quite traumatic enough. Your homelessness isn’t homeless enough. Your need isn’t needy enough.
“I understand,” I say, because I do. Hierarchy of suffering. I’m a single woman with employable skills and no visible bruises. In the economy of desperation, I’m practically privileged.
“You’ve been doing so well,” she continues, her praise landing like a participation trophy at the Apocalypse Olympics. “I know you’ll land on your feet.”
My feet. Right. The same ones that carried me here six weeks ago with nothing but a backpack and that special kind of terror that comes from knowing the person who loves you might also kill you. The same feet that now need to find stable ground in twenty-three days.
I sip the offensive coffee, letting the bitterness coat my tongue. It matches my thoughts perfectly.
This morning’s philosophical musing about chosen chains feels less profound now, more like wishful thinking dressed up in sophomore year existentialism.
These aren’t chains I’ve selected from some cosmic jewelry box of confinement options.
These are rusted cuffs, emergency measures, temporary solutions that are starting to feel distressingly permanent.
I’m a case number, not a person.
A problem to be solved, not a human to be seen.
A bed that needs to be vacated for someone whose suffering has been deemed more worthy by whatever metric they’re using this week.
And now… a ticking clock.
Fabulous.
I’ve got twenty-three days to rewrite my life.
The city bus lurches forward like a drunk hippo.
I grab the pole, then hiss as my damaged finger brushes against cold metal.
Standing room only—of course—because public transportation exists primarily to remind the working class that comfort is a luxury reserved for people with functioning vehicles and intact lives.
I’m still damp from what the shelter generously calls a “shower”—three minutes of lukewarm water pressure that fluctuates between “gentle mist” and “fire hose assault.” My hair is doing that thing where it’s neither wet enough to be sleek nor dry enough to be presentable.
Humidity-chic, I call it.
Very on-trend for the “recently homeless” fall collection.
Late summer rain slides down the windows like the universe is crying about my life choices.
The cold and blustery day a warning that winter is a miserable affair no one escapes in these parts.
The glass fogs with collective breath, creating a canvas for my reflection—blurry, indistinct, appropriately metaphorical.
Twelve minutes. The bus was twelve minutes late, which means I’ll be seven minutes late to Sweet Dreams, which means Marge will sigh with that particular brand of martyrdom she’s perfected, like my tardiness is a personal attack on her ancestral baking legacy.
Never mind that I was up at dawn, or that I’m working with an infected finger, or that I’m mentally calculating how many centuries of minimum wage it will take to pay off $980 worth of crystal champagne flutes.
That’s 122.5 hours of work, by the way. Just for breaking something I never wanted to touch in the first place.
I should have business cards made: Emmaleen Rourke, Professional Disaster. Or maybe: Miss Lost Opportunity. Formerly known as BookishEmma_leen, currently known as Bleed-for-Minimum-Wage Girl. Available for your next catastrophe.
The bus wheezes to a stop two blocks from Sweet Dreams. I sprint through puddles, my secondhand boots providing all the water protection of tissue paper.
Cold seeps through my socks, between my toes, up my ankles.
The wind finds every hole in my coat sleeves with the precision of a sadistic acupuncturist.
I round the corner toward the alley between Sweet Dreams and Bavga’s Restaurant—and stop dead.
Three men stand outside Bavga’s employee entrance. Dark suits, hands in pockets, shoulders squared, exuding the casual menace of apex predators lounging at a watering hole. Two of them glance my way with the clinical interest of butchers assessing a particularly unimpressive cut of meat.
The third man has his back to me. Broad shoulders, razor-sharp haircut, a stance that commands the very molecules of air around him to arrange themselves according to his preference.
He turns.
Oh.
Oh fuck.
It’s him. Hotel Guy. Lambo Man. Mob Boss. The human black hole who absorbed all sound and light at the gala.
Mr. Bavga. Italian name, expensive watch, eyes that cataloged my every movement as I walked out of the event, defeated and newly jobless.
He’s somehow worse in the daylight. More precise. More intentional. His suit isn’t just tailored—it’s a second skin. No tie today, just an open collar that somehow makes him look more dangerous, not less. Like he’s one step closer to whatever violence lives beneath the designer fabric.
I force my feet forward. Chin up, eyes ahead, playing the invisibility game that every woman learns by age twelve. I am nothing. I am no one. I’m just trying to get to work, sir, please don’t notice me.
My hand reaches for the bakery door handle—and I look.
I shouldn’t, but I do.
His eyes narrow slightly.
Assessing. Calculating.
I’m a variable in whatever equation he’s solving.
Maybe a threat.
Maybe nothing.
The bakery doorbell jingles with all the cheerful irony of a death knell. I step inside, and the warm cloud of butter, flour, and sugar hits me like a memory of safety. For nearly two seconds, I remember what it’s like to breathe without my ribs feeling like they’re made of glass.
Then reality crashes back in the form of Marge Whitaker.
“You’re late, Emmaleen.”
Marge stands behind the counter, a human roadblock, arms crossed over her chest. She’s a squat, scowling monument to bitterness, approximately five feet of concentrated disappointment wrapped in a flour-dusted apron.
Her voice has the textural quality of someone who’s been gargling gravel and regret for sixty years.
Her black pants aren’t so much worn as they are resigned to their fate—dusted with flour not from actual effort but from proximity to it, like she absorbs ingredients through osmosis while directing others to do the actual work.
“The almond croissants should have been laminated twenty minutes ago.” She checks her watch with the theatrical precision of a bomb squad technician. “Bertha’s jammed again, and if those croissants aren’t ready for the mid-morning rush, we might as well go back to bed.”