Zoe's POV
The eviction notice is still taped to her apartment door when Zoe gets home. White paper. Black letters. Numbers that feel like a countdown to disaster.
SEVENTY-TWO HOURS TO VACATE.
She rips it down and stares at it like the words might rearrange themselves into something better. They don't.
Inside the apartment, the silence hits different. The walls are bare now. The couch is gone, sold for three hundred dollars to a guy from Craigslist two weeks ago. The kitchen table, the TV, even the bookshelf her mom painted yellow when Zoe was seven. All of it converted into cash that disappeared into hospital bills.
She sits down on the floor where the couch used to be.
Her phone buzzes.
UNKNOWN NUMBER flashes across the screen. Then another buzz. Then another. She doesn't need to look. Another debt collector. They come in waves now. Calling from morning until late at night, their voices smooth and threatening, asking for money she doesn't have for a mother who's been dead eight months.
Zoe mutes the phone.
The apartment is cold even though it's September. The landlord stopped sending heat six weeks ago. She told him rent came first and he called it a threat. That's when he started the eviction process. That's when everything accelerated toward this moment.
Seventy-two hours.
She counts the money in her wallet even though she counted it this morning. Thirty-four dollars and sixteen cents. Enough for maybe two days of food if she's careful. Not enough for a new deposit. Not enough for anything that matters.
The diner fired her this morning.
That part still burns. She was late once. One time in four months because the bus broke down and she had to walk from the other side of the city. One customer complained that she wasn't smiling bright enough while he lectured her about working harder to get ahead. Like she wasn't already working double shifts. Like she wasn't already drowning.
The manager pulled her aside after her shift. Apologized. Said his hands were tied. Said customers are always right.
Zoe had taken off her apron and walked out.
Now she sits on her empty floor and realizes she just made a very stupid choice.
Her phone lights up again. This time it's a text from Lena.
"Move in with me. I mean it."
Lena Park. Best friend since sophomore year of high school. Currently living in a studio apartment in Brooklyn that's barely big enough for one person, let alone two. She's been texting the same offer all week and Zoe has been saying no because Lena is broke too. They're both broke. That's what keeps them tethered to each other.
Zoe types back: "Your place is already too small."
The response comes fast. "Then we'll make it work. You're not sleeping in your car."
Zoe has slept in her car before. Winter of senior year when her mom's cancer treatment emptied their savings and there was nowhere else to go. She remembers November nights with the windows fogging up and her breath turning to clouds. Remembers waking up with ice on the windshield and a fear that tasted like metal.
She doesn't want to remember that again.
She's still staring at Lena's message when her phone rings. Unknown number. Again. She almost doesn't answer.
"Zoe Mitchell?"
The voice is different. Professional. Female. Not a debt collector. Someone calling from somewhere with carpet and air conditioning.
"Yes?" Zoe's voice comes out small.
"I'm calling on behalf of Marcus Hale. He would like to meet with you regarding a business proposition. Are you available tomorrow at ten in the morning?"
The name hits her like a punch.
Marcus Hale.
She hasn't heard that name in fourteen years. Not since fifth grade. Not since the scholarship kid with holes in his sneakers and a backpack held together with duct tape. Not since the boy who sat next to her in Mrs. Chen's class and shared her peanut butter sandwiches because his mom forgot to pack lunch half the time.
Marcus Hale who disappeared into private school when his scholarship came through. Marcus Hale who she hasn't thought about in years except sometimes late at night when she's alone and remembers what it felt like to matter to someone, even if it was just a sad kid in a broken neighborhood.
Now he's on magazine covers.
Now he's a billionaire.
Now he's calling her.
"I'm sorry, what?" Zoe's heart is doing something strange in her chest.
"Marcus Hale would like to meet with you. Tomorrow. Ten AM. He said it was regarding a business proposition." The woman's tone suggests she has no idea why this random girl matters enough to warrant a personal call. "Will that work for you?"
Zoe's brain is stuttering. Of all the people in the world, why is Marcus Hale suddenly calling her when her entire life is imploding?
"What kind of proposition?" she manages to ask.
"He'll explain in person. So is that a yes?"
Zoe looks around her empty apartment. Looks at the eviction notice crumpled in her hand. Looks at her wallet with its pathetic thirty-four dollars.
What else does she have to lose?
"Yeah," she says quietly. "I'm available."
The woman gives her an address. Hale Enterprises. Seventy floors of steel and glass in Midtown Manhattan. She says it like Zoe should be impressed. Zoe writes it down with a pen that's running out of ink.
When she hangs up, the silence is louder than before.
She sits there on the floor of her empty apartment and her hands are shaking.
Marcus Hale.
The name keeps echoing. The boy who was always too smart, too serious, too aware that he didn't belong. The boy who made her laugh by doing terrible math problems on purpose. The boy she forgot about because forgetting was easier than remembering a friend who became someone else.
She pulls up her phone and searches his name.
His face fills the screen.
He looks nothing like the skinny kid she remembers. He's older, sharper, dangerous in a way that makes her breath catch. Dark hair. Sharp jawline. Green eyes that look like they've seen things that broke him and put him back together wrong.
She reads the headlines. Tech genius. Self-made billionaire. Youngest CEO to take a company public. Dates supermodels. Ruthless in business. Cold in interviews.
This is not the boy who shared her sandwiches.
This is someone else entirely.
And somehow he wants to meet with her.
Zoe scrolls through the stories about his company, his deals, his net worth that's worth more than her entire neighborhood's houses combined. She finds a photo of him at some gala with a blonde woman hanging off his arm. They're engaged, according to the caption. Vanessa Hartley. Old money. Same circles.
He looks bored next to her.
Zoe closes the phone.
She doesn't sleep that night. She lies on the floor of her empty apartment and stares at the ceiling and thinks about a boy who mattered once. She thinks about how people change. How the world breaks things if you let it. How Marcus Hale became someone powerful while she stayed exactly where she started.
At six in the morning, she showers in cold water because the hot water heater is broken and the landlord won't fix it. She puts on her only decent dress, the black one she wore to her mom's funeral. It's thrift store quality, with a small stain on the hem that won't come out.
She walks to the Hale Enterprises building at nine-thirty because the subway is too expensive and walking gives her time to panic.
The building is massive. All glass and chrome and the kind of money she'll never touch. Security guards. Marble floors. Everything designed to make people like her feel small.
A woman at the front desk looks her up and down. Zoe sees the judgment land and settle like dust.
"I have a ten o'clock with Marcus Hale," Zoe says.
The receptionist types something. Her eyebrows go up.
"Go to the top floor. He's expecting you."
The elevator ride up makes Zoe's ears pop. Seventy floors. She counts them on the digital display, her heart getting heavier with each number.
The elevator doors open onto a space that looks like a magazine spread. All minimalist furniture and views of Manhattan that make her dizzy.
A door opens.
Marcus Hale walks out.
And Zoe forgets how to breathe.
He's taller than she remembered. Broader. Harder in ways that weren't there before. But his eyes are still green. Still have that same intensity that used to make her feel like maybe she existed to him.
His expression doesn't change when he sees her. Professional. Controlled. Like she's just another person he's scheduled into his day.
"Zoe," he says, and hearing her name in that voice does something to her chest. "Thank you for coming."
She tries to smile but her face won't cooperate.
"Hi Marcus." Her voice sounds like it's coming from very far away. "It's been..."
"Fourteen years," he says quietly.
He knows exactly how long.
"Yeah," she breathes. "Fourteen years."
He gestures toward his office door. Everything about him is controlled. Measured. Nothing like the kid who used to draw funny cartoons on his homework.
"We should talk about why I called you here," Marcus says, and there's something in his tone that makes the hair on her neck stand up. "Come inside."
Zoe walks past him into the office. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlook Manhattan like he owns it. Maybe he does.
She sits down in a chair that's probably worth more than her car.
Marcus sits across from her. Leans forward slightly. His green eyes lock onto hers and she feels it everywhere.
"I need a favor," he says.
"Okay," Zoe whispers.
"I need a girlfriend."
Everything in Zoe's world stops.
"What?" she manages.
Marcus's expression doesn't shift. Professional. Like he's proposing a business merger, not asking her to pretend to be his girlfriend.
"For a business retreat this weekend. Three days in the Hamptons. I need to appear stable, committed, romantically involved." He pauses. "I'm willing to pay five thousand dollars for your time."
The number hits her like a physical blow.
Five thousand dollars.
Three months of rent.
A way out of sleeping in her car.
A way out of this nightmare.
"Why me?" Zoe asks because she has to know. Because this doesn't make sense. Because billionaires don't call random girls from their childhood and offer them money for fake dates.
Marcus's jaw tightens almost imperceptibly.
"Because I trust you," he says quietly.
And something in those words, the way he says them, makes Zoe wonder if Marcus Hale is hiding something much bigger than a business deal.
"When do we start?" she asks.
His lips curve into something that's not quite a smile.
"Tomorrow morning. We leave at six."