CHAPTER 3: RICE AND RENT

The hotel sheets smelled like bleach and other people's sleep.

Elena had been folding since six because the morning shift paid fifty cents more an hour. Her fingers moved on autopilot, crease, fold, stack, crease, fold, stack, while her brain ran the math it had been running all night.

Rent: $847 short. Due Friday.

Diner shift: $67 after taxes if nobody stiffed her on tips.

Tonight at The Hollow: Three dollars. Two of them hers.

She was going to lose her apartment. The math didn't work. The math never worked. She just kept showing up and folding other people's sheets and pretending the numbers would rearrange themselves into something survivable.

Her phone sat propped against a stack of pillowcases. Jasmine's name lighting up the screen every thirty seconds like a pulse.

How was last night Did Tommy pay you yet He better pay you Elena ELENA I swear if you're ignoring me

She typed one-handed, folding with the other. Alive. Sang. Three dollars. New sound guy.

Three dots appeared before she'd even set the phone down.

New sound guy??? Is he cute He's cute isn't he ELENA MARIE CROSS

She shoved the phone under a towel. She was not going to stand in a hotel laundry room that smelled like industrial detergent and have a conversation about a man she'd spoken to for four minutes.

Four minutes. She'd timed it without meaning to. Her brain had been counting.

Traitor.

Mrs. Park, the head housekeeper, passed with her clipboard. Looked at Elena. Looked at the towel pile. Looked at Elena again.

"Less phone. More towel."

"Yes ma'am."

She folded faster. Her shoulders had that deep ache that lived somewhere between muscle and bone, the kind sleep didn't fix because she never got enough sleep to fix anything.

By noon she was at the diner. Grease smell and burnt coffee and a man at table six who kept calling her "sweetheart" and letting his hand drift too close to her hip when she cleared his plate.

"Touch me and you'll wear that omelet," she said. Customer service smile. But her eyes weren't smiling and he moved his hand.

Jasmine showed up at two. Slid into a booth like she owned it, ordered coffee she couldn't afford, and pointed.

"Sound guy. Talk."

"There's nothing to talk about."

"You mentioned a man voluntarily. You never mention men. The last time you mentioned a man was when that guy on the bus sneezed on you and you wanted to file a police report."

"That was assault, Jas."

"Tell me about the sound guy."

Elena refilled the coffee. Poured slow so her hands had something to do.

"He fixed my levels. Without asking. Just sat at the board and cleaned everything up."

"And?"

"And nothing."

"Elena."

"He said my voice was doing all the work." She set the coffee pot down harder than she meant to. "He said the system was robbing me of thirty percent of my range."

Jasmine leaned back. Studied her with that look she had, the one that read people like they were written in large print. Like the words coming out of your mouth were just decoration and the real story was underneath.

"You like him."

"I talked to him for four minutes."

"You counted the minutes."

Damn it.

"I'm not doing this." Elena grabbed a rag, started wiping a table that was already clean. "I have rent I can't make. Marcus needs tuition. I'm running on four hours of sleep across three jobs. I don't have room for a sound guy."

"Nobody has room for anything good, Ella. That's the whole point. You make room."

"Easy to say when you're not the one choosing between electricity and groceries."

Jasmine's face softened. She reached across the booth and grabbed Elena's wrist. Her fingers were warm, her grip firm. The kind of touch that says I'm here without needing the words.

"You'll figure out the rent. You always do."

"One of these days the math isn't going to work, Jas."

"Then you'll move in with me and we'll eat rice and argue about dishes and you'll sing your way out of it. Same as always."

Elena's throat tightened. Not from sadness. From the specific kind of love that comes from someone who's seen you at your worst and keeps showing up anyway. Jasmine had been that person since they were sixteen, harmonizing in Elena's mother's kitchen, back when the apartment still smelled like lavender lotion and there was someone waiting up.

She squeezed Jasmine's hand. Once. Quick. Then pulled away because if she held on any longer she was going to cry in the middle of the lunch rush and that was not happening.

"I'm fine."

"You're a liar."

"I'm a fine liar."

Jasmine almost laughed. Almost.

The bell above the door chimed.

Elena looked up and every nerve in her body fired at once. A full alarm with no instructions.

Danny Miller walked into her diner.