Chapter 1 - The Twelve-Dollar Choice
Sarah Carter had exactly twelve dollars and forty-three cents in her wallet when she stopped beneath the glowing window of the most expensive boutique on Michigan Avenue.
Eleven of those dollars were supposed to help pay for her sixteen-year-old brother’s heart medication the next morning. The remaining dollar and change were all she had until Friday. Still, Sarah stood there in the cold Chicago rain, soaked through her thrift-store coat, staring at a midnight-blue evening gown that cost more than she earned in three months.
She wasn’t imagining champagne. She wasn’t imagining photographers. She wasn’t even imagining a man looking at her and thinking she was beautiful. She was wondering what it must feel like to want one beautiful thing without immediately calculating which bill would have to go unpaid for wanting it.
Then, behind the glass, a man stopped walking. He had been halfway through a conversation with three executives when he saw her. Thirty-four-year-old Michael Brooks owned the building. He owned the boutique. He owned the global investment firm whose name was printed in silver letters above Sarah’s head. And although Sarah didn’t know it yet, he had just watched her do something that would make him remember her long after she disappeared into the rain.
A bus hissed to the curb. Sarah instinctively reached into her pocket for the fare. Then she noticed an elderly woman standing several feet away, fumbling with two grocery bags while trying to hold a broken umbrella over her head.
One of the bags split. Oranges rolled across the wet sidewalk. Sarah looked at the arriving bus, then at the woman, then at the bus again. The doors opened. She missed it anyway.
“Ma’am, wait.”
Sarah hurried through the rain, crouching to gather the oranges before they rolled into traffic. The woman looked close to tears. “My hands don’t work the way they used to,” she said apologetically.
“That makes two of us.” Sarah smiled and held up her red, cracked hands. The woman laughed. Sarah packed the groceries into her own canvas work bag and carried them half a block to a waiting cab. When the driver said the woman was short three dollars for the fare, Sarah reached into her wallet without hesitating.
Michael watched her hand over three of the twelve dollars she possessed. He did not know it was nearly all she had. He only knew that the woman who had spent ten minutes staring at a four-thousand-dollar dress had walked away from it to help somebody else pick oranges out of the gutter.
“Mr. Brooks?” His operations director was still speaking. “The donor seating chart?”
“Tomorrow.”
“But the benefit is Saturday.”
“I said tomorrow, Claire.”
His attention returned to the sidewalk. Sarah was gone. Only rain remained, sliding down the glass in silver streams. Michael stared at the empty place where she had stood. For reasons he could not explain, the dress behind the window suddenly looked different. Less like merchandise. More like a question.
Three miles away, Sarah climbed the narrow stairs above Denny’s Bread & Pie carrying a paper sack containing two cans of soup, store-brand crackers, and one bruised apple.
“Sarah?” Ethan was stretched across their old couch beneath a blanket.
“You’re supposed to be studying.”
“I was.”
“The television says otherwise.”
“It was helping me study.”
“The Bulls game?”
“Statistics.”
She tossed a couch pillow at him. He caught it and grinned. For a second, Sarah forgot the unpaid electric bill stuck beneath the sugar jar. She forgot the pharmacy reminder on her phone. She forgot the ache between her shoulder blades from spending nine hours at the Lakeshore Carlton Hotel front desk and another four cleaning offices downtown.
Ethan had their mother’s smile. That was both a gift and a cruelty. Three years earlier, Sarah had stood beside her mother’s hospice bed while Helen Carter struggled for her final breaths. “Promise me something,” Helen had whispered. “Don’t let taking care of him become the reason you stop living.”
Sarah had cried then because she thought the request was ridiculous. Of course she would live. She was twenty-four. She had plans. She had two semesters remaining in her hospitality-management degree. She wanted to manage a major hotel someday. She wanted an apartment with windows that didn’t shake in January.
Three years later, her textbooks were in a cardboard box beneath her bed. She had become Ethan’s guardian before she had figured out her own life. Their father, Daniel, had vanished when Ethan was nine. There had been promises at first—birthday cards, phone calls, then silence. Sarah stopped expecting him. Expectations were just another kind of bill that eventually came due.
“You eat?” she asked.
Ethan nodded too quickly. Sarah opened the refrigerator. Half a sandwich remained untouched.
“Ethan.”
“I wasn’t hungry.”
“You have to eat with the medication.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
He stared at his hands. “Because there’s food for two dinners in there, and I figured—”
“Don’t.” Her voice came out sharper than she intended. “Don’t ever do that.”
Ethan looked away. Sarah closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am.”
“You work fifteen hours a day, Sarah.”
“I’m fine.”
May you like
“You always say that.”
At 2:13 that morning, Sarah woke to the sound of something falling. She ran into the living room. Ethan was on one knee beside the couch, clutching his chest.
