Chapter 7

I didn't sleep... Around four in the morning, I give up pretending and start a spreadsheet.

It's an ugly thing. Three columns, no formatting, typed at the kitchen table with a cold mug of tea going stale beside me. "Keep. Sell. Firewood." I walk through my apartment with the laptop balanced on one arm and sort every object I own into one of those three boxes.

The rules are simple. If it can't keep me warm, fed, or safe, it's money. If it can't be turned into money fast, it's kindling.

The couch goes under *Sell*. So does the TV, the tablet, the camera I bought for a photography phase that lasted five weeks, a stand mixer I've used twice, and a leather handbag that cost more than my first car. The space heater stays, along with my good boots and the thick winter coat I've been wearing since college. My grandmother's ring stays in its box, and I don't even put it on the list. It was never an asset. It's the reason I'm doing any of this.

By 8:15, I was done, I picked up my phone and dialed my retirement account number.

The hold music is a cheerful piano loop. I listen to it for nine minutes, and for every one of them I picture the line of people in the Freeze who'll stand outside a bank that no longer has a roof, holding statements that no longer mean anything.

"Thank you for holding," a young man says finally. "How can I help you today?"

"I'd like to withdraw everything in my account."

There's a pause. I can practically hear him straighten in his chair. "Ma'am, I have to let you know that early withdrawal comes with a ten percent penalty, plus income tax. You'd be giving up a significant portion."

"I understand."

"You'd lose roughly twenty-five percent. Possibly more."

"Yes."

"Are you in some kind of financial trouble?"

I almost laugh. "No. The opposite, actually."

He clearly doesn't know what to make of that, but he processes it. When I hang up, I've just torched twenty-five percent of eleven thousand dollars, and I feel nothing but light. That money was a promise that the future would be shaped like the past. It was never going to be, and now it's eight thousand, two hundred dollars that can actually become rice.

The first buyer arrives at ten-thirty, a man in his forties with a ponytail and a truck. He walks around the couch, frowns at the left cushion, and says, "Two hundred."

"Four-fifty," I say.

"It's eight months old and there's no pet hair. The frame's solid oak."

"Three hundred."

"Four hundred." I cross my arms. "And you load it yourself, which saves me the trouble of asking my neighbor to help."

He studies me for a long second. "Three-seventy-five."

"Done."

He and his teenage son wrestle the couch down three flights of stairs. I watch from the doorway and wait for some wave of regret. I think about the night Dana and Garrett lay on that couch under my mother's quilt, a night that hasn't happened yet and now it never will, at least not here.

The couch disappears around the corner in the back of a truck, and I feel exactly one thing. I feel *better.*

The rest of the morning goes in a blur of messages, haggling, and strangers in my doorway. A college student takes the TV and the tablet for five hundred and ten dollars total, mostly because I cut my asking price when she mentions she's paying for textbooks. A woman pays me three hundred and fifty for the handbag without blinking. Someone I'm fairly sure is a reseller shows up for the camera and tries to talk me down by half. I tell him I have a second buyer arriving in twenty minutes. I don't, but I do watch him decide, with visible irritation.

By noon, I've made just over fifteen hundred dollars, and I've learned something that I find mildly unsettling about myself. I'm good at this. Garrett used to say I was too soft to negotiate. Dana used to say I let people walk all over me. But I spent four years as a freight dispatcher, haggling with truckers who'd sell their own mothers for a fuel surcharge, and apparently some part of that survived under all the apologies.

I just never pointed it at my own life.

I take the last of my jewelry to a pawn shop on Dennison Avenue.

The man behind the counter wears a jeweler's loupe pushed up on his forehead like a second eyebrow. I slide my small box of costume pieces across the glass, then the watch.

The watch is the good one. Silver, heavy, with a little diamond chip at the twelve. Garrett gave it to me for my birthday in March. I remember the way he'd said it, leaning against my doorframe with a smug little smile. "Two months' pay, Abbie. Don't ever say I never spoil you."

I had cried. I'd worn it every day since.

The man turns it over in his fingers and pulls down the loupe. He's quiet for a long moment. Then he sets the watch gently on the glass, like something that might break from embarrassment.

"It's a nice replica," he says. "Good movement, for what it is. I'll give you forty."

"A replica."

"Yeah. Honey, I don't want to be rude, but the logo's wrong, and the weight's off. This is maybe a sixty-dollar watch retail." He gives me a sympathetic look. "Whoever gave it to you either got scammed or..."

"Or lied," I finish.

He shrugs, kindly.

I look at the watch. I think about two months' pay. I think about the way Garrett said *don't ever say I never spoil you,* and how I'd kept every word of it like a love letter.

Then I start laughing. It's an odd, quiet sound, and the man behind the counter looks nervous, but I can't stop for a moment. It isn't even the lie that's funny. It's how small it is. Dana took my food and my blankets and my life. Garrett's contribution to the whole collapse of my trust was a sixty-dollar watch he wanted me to think cost a fortune.

"Forty's fine," I say, wiping my eyes.

"Thank you."

I walk out into the afternoon sun with forty dollars and a strange, clean feeling, as if someone had finally washed a window I hadn't known was dirty.

For the rest of the day, I keep working. A bike goes to a delivery guy for one-eighty. A stack of designer sweaters goes to a consignment store. A set of kitchen knives, too good to give away, goes to a chef who pays cash and shakes my hand like I've done him a favor. My books go to a used bookstore for pennies, and I keep exactly four of them, the practical ones, with titles like *Wilderness Medicine* and *The Complete Guide to Preserving.*

By night, my feet are screaming and my apartment looks like a student dorm. There's a mattress, a table, two chairs, a space heater, and a floor stacked with the neat, ugly boxes of the first mission's supplies. I sit down on the mattress with the laptop and a glass of water and total up the day.

Savings: $3,967.

Retirement: $8,200.

Everything I've sold: $2,914.

Total: $15,081

I stare at the screen. Fifteen thousand dollars. It's more than I've ever held at once in my life.

The System appears, floating politely in the corner of my vision

[Preparation I: Estimated cost $23,400. Host's available funds: $15,081.]

Eight thousand, three hundred and nineteen dollars short. Forty days to find it.

I lean my head back against the wall. I've already sold the couch, my retirement, and half of my twenties, and there's nothing left that anyone would pay for. I think about the little wooden box on the dresser, and I make my eyes go somewhere else.

Estimated cost.

I look at the words again, and something clicks into place.

*Estimated.* The System prices things the way a stranger would. The way a person walks into a supermarket and pays whatever's on the tag. But I'm not a stranger. I've spent four years in an office where the real prices were whispered over radios, and where the big warehouses of this region moved pallets of rice and flour and canned goods every single day, long before they ever saw a shelf.

Retail is for people who don't know anyone.

I pick up my phone and scroll to a contact I haven't called in months. *Big Hal.* A heavy-set long-haul driver with a laugh like a diesel engine, who once told me I'd saved his route and his marriage in one afternoon, and that he owed me one.

It's nine-forty at night. He's probably in a truck stop in the next state, eating pie.

I press call.