Sold To a Billionaire

Amelia's POV

The rent notice was taped to our door again. I peeled it off before my father could see it. I did not need to read it, because I already knew what it said. We owed three months, and our landlord had finally run out of patience.

I folded the paper into my coat pocket and unlocked the door. Our apartment sat on the poorer side of Manhattan, where the pipes rattled all night and the heater worked only when it felt like it. The kitchen smelled like burnt coffee and old paper. My father sat at the table with a pile of unpaid bills spread out in front of him. He did not look up when I came in.

"Did you find work today?" Thomas asked.

"I picked up extra shifts at the diner," I said.

That was a lie, and I told it as smoothly as I told all of them. The truth was hidden in an envelope inside my coat. A man had paid me in a hotel room the night before. I had left before the sun came up, and I had walked home through empty streets with my shoes in my hand. I had been ashamed every step of the way. I had also known that the cupboards would be full by evening.

I put the groceries on the counter one by one. I bought cheap things in small amounts so my father would not ask how I could afford them. He watched me line up the bread and the eggs and the little jar of peanut butter. His face looked tired and gray. He had not always looked that way. When my mother was alive, he used to whistle while he cooked.

She died when I was fourteen. After that, the whistling stopped and the bills started. My father lost his job at the warehouse, and then he lost the second one. Every month he grew a little more bitter, and every month our home grew a little smaller around us. I learned to stretch a dollar until it screamed. I learned to smile at landlords and lie to teachers. I also learned that a pretty face could buy what hard work never could.

I did not want to know that, but the world taught it to me anyway.

My first night with a stranger happened when I was twenty. I will not describe it, because I have spent three years trying to forget it. I only remember that I sat in the shower afterward until the hot water ran out. I told myself it was once. Then the next rent notice came, and I told myself it was twice. After a while I stopped counting, because counting made me feel sick.

I never told my father. I never told anyone, not even Claire, who was my best friend and the only person who ever asked if I was eating enough. Shame is a heavy thing to carry alone, but it is easier than watching someone you love look at you differently.

"You need to eat something," I told my father.

"I am not hungry," he said, but he took the sandwich anyway.

I left for my shift at the diner at four. Claire met me at the back door with two paper cups of terrible coffee. She wore her apron crooked, and her hair was falling out of its clip. She handed me a cup and studied my face.

"You look like you did not sleep," she said.

"I never sleep," I said. "It is a hobby."

She laughed, but her eyes stayed worried. Claire had grown up two streets away from me, and she knew what poverty smelled like. She knew that I stayed out late sometimes and came home with money. She never asked where it came from, and I was grateful for that every single day.

The diner was busy that night. A man at table six pinched my arm when I poured his coffee. A woman at table nine left me a ten dollar tip on a four dollar bill. Life rarely made sense in that place, but I understood its rhythm. I carried plates and smiled and counted the hours until my feet stopped hurting.

At eleven, I walked home beneath yellow streetlights and thought about the envelope in my coat. It held eight hundred dollars. That would cover the rent notice, though not the three months behind it. My father's debts were a hungry animal, and every dollar I fed it only made it hungrier. I had no idea how much longer I could keep running.

When I opened our front door, the apartment was quiet. My father sat in the dark kitchen with his phone in his hand. The screen lit his face from below and made him look like a stranger. He lifted his eyes to mine, and I felt something cold slide down my spine.

"You look more like your mother every day," he said slowly. "Do you know that people notice you, Amelia?"

"People notice a lot of things," I answered. "Why are you sitting in the dark?"

"I was thinking," he said.

He did not say what he was thinking about. He only kept looking at me with that strange expression, as if he were measuring me for something. It was the look of a man counting money before he had earned it.

I went to my room and shut the door. I lay on my narrow bed and stared at the water stain on the ceiling. It was shaped like a country I had never visited. I had stared at it for so many years that I could draw it from memory.

Hours passed. The building settled and creaked around me. At some point after midnight, I heard my father's voice through the thin wall. He was speaking low, and he was speaking to someone on the phone.

I could not hear every word. I heard the phrase "three men" and the phrase "serious money." Then I heard one sentence so clearly that my breath stopped in my chest.

"She is perfect for this," my father said. "She will never refuse once she hears the number."

I sat up in bed with my heart pounding against my ribs. I did not know what he meant yet. I only knew that I had never heard my father sound so hopeful, and that his hope scared me more than any debt ever had.

I pulled my blanket up to my chin and stared at the dark. Sleep did not come back that night. Somewhere in the city, something had already started moving, and I had no idea that my whole life was about to be sold