Chapter 1—Everything That Was Left.

Rebecca's POV

"Rebecca! You think this house sweeps itself? Get up!"

I was already awake.

I had been lying on my folded wrapper on the storeroom floor for ten minutes, listening to the compound come alive. The tap. A pot on the stove. Mama Maria's slippers on the corridor tiles — quick this morning, which meant I needed to be standing before she reached the door.

I got up immediately and ran out.

I was seven years old. I had been living in Mama Maria's house for a little over a year, ever since my parents died in a road accident and nobody could think of anything else to do with me. She was my mother's cousin, or something like that. Nobody explained the details. They just put me in the back of a car and brought me here, and here was where I stayed.

She had four children who ate at the table, while I ate standing at the counter when there was something left in the pot, and went to bed on water when there wasn't.

On the morning I was eight, I spilled a full bucket of water across the kitchen floor.

I heard her footsteps before I could even think of what to do.

"What did you do?"

"Aunty, it slipped, I'm sorry."

"Sorry." She said the word back to me like it sounded wrong in her ears. "You've ruined my floor, and you're standing there saying sorry. Kneel down."

"Aunty, please, there's a cloth on the—"

"I did not ask about any cloth. Kneel down and clean it with your hands. Since water is so easy to spill, let your hands learn what it costs."

I knelt down. The water soaked through my school dress, and my knees ached against the tiles. I pressed my palms flat and wiped in long strokes toward the door while she stood in the doorway with her arms folded and watched every movement, making sure I did not reach for the cloth. When I finished, she looked at my red, wet hands.

"Now the bathroom. And if I see one mark on that mirror tonight, you'll do it again in the dark."

Then she turned and walked away.

I pressed my hands to my dress and did not cry. There was no point. Nobody came when I cried.

The hunger I felt in that house was its own kind of education.

I fainted at school when I was ten. I came around on the corridor floor with my teacher leaning over me and two girls staring from a safe distance. She took me to the staffroom and gave me water and half her own bread, and I ate it so fast she put her hand over mine.

"Slow down, Rebecca. Slow down. You're going to choke if you eat this fast. When did you last eat?"

"This morning," I said.

"What did you eat this morning?"

I froze mid chewing and said nothing, and that was how she knew I was lying. Immediately, she sent a note home.

That evening, Mama Maria read it at the kitchen table, folded it very slowly, and looked at me over the top of it.

"You fainted," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes, Aunty."

"In front of everyone at that school."

"Yes."

"Do you know what people will say? They'll say I starve you in my house. Is that what you want? For people to say that about me?"

"No, Aunty. I'm sorry."

"Eat before you leave for school tomorrow. I will not have your teachers calling here."

That was the whole of her concern. Not whether I was all right. But whether it reflected badly on her.

When she left, I opened the pot on the stove and ate cold rice, standing up with my fingers and listened for footsteps.

At age twelve, Jimmy told the boys at school about me. Three days of names called across the fence at lunch — about the storeroom floor, the one uniform, and being nobody's real child.

As painful as it felt, I said nothing. I ate alone and kept my face still, and at dinner that evening, Jimmy looked at me across the table and shrugged, just shrugged, like he had done nothing at all.

After dinner, I went behind the water tank at the back of the compound and sat in the dirt and cried until my throat was raw. That strip of shadow between the tank and the wall was the only place in the compound that was mine. I had been going there since I was seven. The ground was packed hard from how many times I had sat in it.

—----

"Rebecca! Rebecca! Where's that girl?"

"Yes, Aunty," I came running.

"I have an appointment this morning. Take this cloth," she said, stretching one of her gowns toward me. "Iron this very well. It needs to look smooth."

"Yes, ma," I nodded and collected it.

I had barely slept the night before as I'd been cleaning and scrubbing the floors. I was so tired that I didn't know when I slept off as I was ironing.

The smell of the cloth burning was what woke me up, and shortly, Aunty Maria had already appeared.

"What's going on here?" She asked.

I stepped back instinctively because I knew my safety wasn't sure. I raised a hand to touch the back of my hair. "Aunty, I—"

"You what?" She asked.

"I'm sorry."

"That doesn't answer my question," she said.

"I ask again, and I won't repeat myself. What's going on here?"

I went down on my knees immediately. "Please aunty… please," I said, rubbing my palms together. "It was a mistake. I… I," I said and touched the back of my head again.

"Have you lost your tongue?" She walked up to me and pulled my ear. "Will you speak before I do something I may regret?"

"I burnt your cloth, ma,"

She burst into laughter. "You must be joking," she said, then laughed again. "No, really. You must be joking."

I watched her laugh, still on my knees. There was nothing more for me to say.

She picked up her gown and saw the big hole I had created with the iron.

Before I could say another word, I felt a hot pain in my arm. She had burnt me with the iron. I screamed and cried for help, but she hissed and walked away, leaving me helpless.

—-------

One afternoon, after school, I found her waiting for me at the front door with my raffia bag in her hand.

"You're old enough to manage yourself now," she said. "I've done what I could."

"What?" I stared at the bag. "Aunty, what—"

"Don't stand there looking at me like that. You're sixteen. You have two legs."

"But where do I go? I don't have anywhere to go."

"That," she said, and moved to the front door and opened it, "is not my problem."

Chelsea was filing her nails in the hallway. Jimmy had his arms folded. Little Amira, who was twelve now and had spent her whole life watching me clean her mother's floors, stared at me with wide eyes and said nothing.

I picked up the bag and walked through the door. She closed it, and I heard the bolt slide, and that sound went through me in a way I still feel sometimes when a door closes too hard.

I made it three streets before I sat down on the kerb and fell apart. People walked past on both sides, and not one of them stopped.

That was the first thing the street taught me. Nobody stops.

I found work wherever I could. Dishes at a roadside restaurant for food and a corner to sleep in. Market loads for whatever they felt like paying. A shop front swept every morning for thirty cents, sometimes nothing when the owner forgot. I showered once a week at the public tap behind the market, early, crouched with soap and a bucket, moving fast before the cold won.

I had been on the street for four months when Damon found me.

He came to the roadside restaurant on a rainy evening and watched me carry in the outdoor chairs and smiled at me. His smile was so easy and warm that it caught me completely off guard.

"You always work this late?" he asked.

"When there's work to do."

"Do you get a break? Even ten minutes?"

"I do," I said, smiling. "When I'm done."

He came back the next day. He brought food — rice and curry, hot, proper food in a container, and set it in front of me. Then sat across and watched me eat.

"You eat like you haven't seen food in a week," he said, kindly.

"I'm fine," I said, though my hands were shaking.

"What's your name?"

"Rebecca."

"Rebecca." He said it like the name meant something. "I'm Damon. How long have you been on the street?"

"I'm not—" I stopped. "A few months."

"Do you have people?"

"No."

He was quiet for a moment. He looked at the small bag beside my feet with everything I owned inside it — and then at my face, and his expression was not pity. It was something more careful than pity.

"I have a spare room," he said. "It's yours if you want it. No cost. Just until you're back on your feet."

"I don't know you."

"No," he said. "You don't. But you're sitting here shaking while you eat, and it's raining, and I'm asking."

I looked at him for a long time. I knew, somewhere in the part of me that had learned to survive, that there was no such thing as no cost. But I was sixteen and it was cold and I had nowhere else to go.

So I said, "Okay."

I loved him the way someone loves who has never been properly loved — completely, without reservation, without anything held back. That kind of love is not a strength. It is the most dangerous kind of weakness.