The street went silent. Not quiet. Silent. Like someone hit mute on Chicago.
"A real contract," he said. "The kind that pays more than you'll make in the next ten years doing... this."
Rosaline Vance.
Not Rose.
Not Williams.
Her real name. The one she buried in a shallow grave three years ago and tried to forget. The one that was in every headline next to structural negligence and criminal indictment and—
Fourteen people.
*Fourteen. *
She hadn't heard that name out loud in three years. She'd scrubbed it from everything she could find. Changed her hair. Moved three times. Worked under the table for cash. Didn't have social media, didn't have a lease in her own name, didn't even have a library card.
And this man. This stranger. Just said it on a public sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon like it was nothing.
It hit her somewhere behind her ribs. Not pain exactly. More like everything just stopped. Lungs stopped. Heart stopped. Brain stopped. Just her standing there with her mouth slightly open and the brown envelope in her pocket and the hospital still showing as a missed call on her phone.
She couldn't breathe.
She couldn't think.
How did he find her?
How the hell did he find her?
"I don't do high rises anymore."
Her voice cracked. Right down the middle. And she wanted to slap herself for it because really? Three years of hiding and running and eating ramen four nights a week and she still couldn't say one sentence without falling apart?
She was supposed to be past this. She told herself she was past this every morning while brushing her teeth with the off-brand toothpaste from the dollar store. She'd practiced being nobody. Being invisible. Being fine.
She was not fine.
Christopher Thorne just stood there. On the sidewalk. Hands in his pockets like a man waiting for a cab except the cab was her and she was not coming.
The wind was going right through her jacket. The bus, her bus, the 8, the one she needed—was pulling up to the stop like forty feet away and he didn't even glance at it. Didn't move. Didn't try to grab her arm or block her path or any of that. Just watched her with those dark circles under his eyes and waited.
She turned. Started walking.
Made it six steps.
"The diner on Halsted. Green awning. I'll be there for the next hour."
She didn't look back. Got on the bus. Sat in the very last row like a kid hiding from the teacher. Pressed her forehead against the window, the glass was freezing and kind of greasy and she didn't care and squeezed her hands together in her lap until her knuckles went white.
Rosaline Vance. He just said it. Out loud. On a street.
And like... did he not understand what that meant? Anyone with a phone could type that name and in five seconds they'd see everything. The articles. That mugshot—God, that mugshot. She'd been crying for six hours straight, and her mascara was everywhere and her lip was split open because she'd bitten clean through it during questioning and they took the photo anyway. They didn't even let her wipe her face first.
The courtroom sketches. Some artist drew her looking like a skeleton with eyeballs. The op-eds from people she used to respect, people she'd had dinner with, people whose kids' birthday parties she went to, calling her reckless. Calling her negligent. One guy she'd mentored for two years wrote a piece for Engineering Weekly that used the phrase "murderer in a hard hat" and she'd thrown up in a Wendy's bathroom after reading it on her phone.
Fourteen people died in the Indigo Collapse.
She didn't kill them. She didn't cut corners. She did not sign off on those materials. The contractor switched suppliers behind her back and falsified the testing reports, and she'd been screaming about it in emails for weeks but nobody—
Nobody listened.
And then the building came down and somebody had to be the face of it and her face was the one they picked.
The bus lurched through a yellow light. The phone buzzed. Hospital again. She stared at the screen until it went black. A little crack running across the glass right through the word "Memorial."
David's meds. Four thousand a month.
Rent. Eight hundred. And that was for a studio apartment where she could touch both walls if she stood in the middle and stretched her arms out.
Bus pass. Hundred sixty.
Food... whatever was left. Which was usually nothing. Or close enough to nothing that the difference didn't matter. Last week she ate peanut butter sandwiches for dinner three nights in a row. No jelly because jelly was four dollars and four dollars was four dollars.
She'd run these numbers so many times they just lived in her head now. Permanent. Like a song stuck on repeat except the song was just math that never added up.
The bus went down Halsted. She saw the green awning.
*Don't. *
Rich men don't show up with contracts because they're nice. They show up because they want something. And they always get it. That's what makes them rich.
Keep going. Ride the bus home. Eat your peanut butter sandwich. Go to sleep. Forget his name.
She pulled the cord.
Got off at the next stop.
And then, because she was apparently a complete idiot with zero survival instincts, she walked back three blocks. In the cold. In her thin jacket. Back toward the man she just ran away from.
Three blocks is a long time to argue with yourself and lose.