Chapter 5: First Earn

He was a boy in an expensive shirt who had never once been told no. "Dess. Babe. Come on. Let's talk about this.

You're being hysterical."

"I'm very calm," I said. "Please leave."

He changed tactics, the way he always did.

His face softened, and his voice dropped, and he reached for my hand. "I love you. You know that.

I was going to tell you—"

"About Cressida?"

He jerked back as if I'd slapped him.

"Out," I said.

It took another four minutes, a few more insults from Winnifred, and a threat from Garrick that I wouldn't last a month on my own, before they finally went.

At the door, Garrick turned back with a look so full of poison that it would have terrified me once.

"You think you're so smart," he said softly. "You think this is over? Check your bank account, Dess."

Then he slammed the door.

The apartment went quiet.

I stood very still. The china gleamed on the table, the good plates, the untouched roast chicken, and I started to shake. Not from fear.

From something wilder, something like laughter and grief and relief all rolled into one.

I slid down the wall into a sitting position on the kitchen floor, pressed both hands over my mouth, and laughed until I cried.

When the shaking finally stopped, I got up, threw the deadbolt, slid the chain across the door, and looked through the peephole.

The hallway was empty. But across from my door, a thin line of light glowed under Idris's apartment, steady and quiet, like someone keeping watch.

I did not know why that made me feel safer. I only knew that it did.

When I could breathe again, I picked up my phone.

Check your bank account.

I opened the old app.

The balance read $0.00.

I stared at it, and then a bubble of delighted, hysterical laughter rose up again, because he had drained twelve dollars and sixty cents out of an account that had been empty for a full day, and he thought he had won.

Keep the sandwich, Garrick.

My phone buzzed in my hand. A new email, sent from my employer's HR department at 11:47 p.m.

Dear Ms. Marlowe, we regret to inform you that your position has been eliminated, effective immediately. Please return all company property by Monday.

I read it once. Then I read it again.

Winnifred Hale had made exactly one phone call between the front door and the elevator. And it had cost me my job.

Six years of loyalty, and it had taken one sentence from a woman in pearls.

I held the phone and waited for the old panic, the what will I do, who will I be, to come rushing in.

It didn't. Not tonight. Something in me had gone very quiet, and very clear.

I lowered the phone slowly.

No savings except four thousand dollars in a new account. No income. A power-hungry family who had just lost control of me and wanted it back.

And six days and twelve hours left to earn my first five hundred dollars, or lose the only advantage I had.

I got up off the kitchen floor and wiped my face.

Fine, I thought. You want to play, Winnifred? Let's play.

I didn't sleep.

By six the next morning, I was dressed, showered, and sitting at the kitchen table with a notebook and a pen, doing something I had never done when I worked for other people: thinking about what I was actually good at.

I was good at logistics.

For six years, I had coordinated shipments for a regional distribution company.

I knew which warehouses sat on dead stock. I knew which suppliers panicked at the end of a quarter.

I knew who owed whom a favor, and who would pick up the phone before eight in the morning.

I picked up my phone.

"Brannigan Surplus," a gravelly voice answered on the second ring. "This better be good."

"Tobias, it's Dess Marlowe. From Coastline Freight."

A pause. Then a bark of laughter. "Marlowe! The only person in your whole company who ever paid me on time.

What can I do for you?"

"I heard NorthRidge Outfitters went under last month."

"Went under, went bust, went belly-up." I could hear him chewing. "Four pallets of winter stock sitting in my back lot that nobody wants.

Thermal sleeping bags, hand warmers, emergency blankets, camp stove canisters. The liquidator wants it gone by Monday. Cash only."

My heart was racing. Winter stock, in December. Nobody wanted it because everybody thought it would sell at full price in January.

They were wrong. It would never again be this cheap.

"How much?" I asked.

He named a number so low that I wrote it down twice.

"I'll take it all," I said. "I can be there by nine."

I rented a cargo van with my own license, which was the first piece of paperwork I had ever signed without asking anyone's permission.

I drove across the city with my hands tight on the wheel and the heater blasting.

I didn't think about Garrick, or Winnifred, or the job I no longer had. I thought about arithmetic.

Forty-eight thermal sleeping bags at eighteen dollars each. Two hundred chemical hand warmers.

Thirty emergency blankets. Twenty-four camp stove canisters. Total: three thousand, nine hundred and twelve dollars, nearly everything I had left.

Tobias Brannigan was exactly as I remembered him, round and sweaty, with a cigar stub he never lit. He looked at me as the pallets were loaded into the van.

"You sure about this, Marlowe? You look like you haven't slept."

"I'm sure," I said, and counted out the cash.

He counted it again anyway, licking his thumb, and then he squinted at me with the cigar stub bobbing in his mouth. "

You know what, Marlowe? You always did look at inventory like it owed you something.

I like that. I'll throw in the box of lighters and the emergency whistles, no charge. Somebody will want those."

"Somebody will," I agreed, and meant it a lot more than he knew.

Not enough to be reckless, I told myself, as the doors slammed shut. Just enough to start.

By ten-thirty, I was back in my own parking lot, staring up at four flights of stairs and a very long lift that, I remembered grimly, was out of service until Monday.

"Okay," I said to the empty van. "Okay. Let's do this."