Chapter 1 - FOURTEEN DOLLARS AND SIXTY-TWO CENTS
The little girl laid fourteen dollars and sixty-two cents on my marble counter and asked which aisle we kept the fathers in.
I owned seventy-three stores. I had negotiated with men who could buy entire city blocks before breakfast. Yet when a child in a pale-blue dress looked up at me and asked whether that amount was enough for somebody who wouldn't leave, I couldn't form a single useful sentence.
It was a rainy Thursday in Portland, and I wasn't supposed to be on the sales floor. I was supposed to be upstairs, firing a regional director over an inventory discrepancy. I'd built Sterling & Co. from a single rented storefront into a chain of home-and-lifestyle stores, and people had begun treating my time as if it were more valuable than theirs. Some days, I let them.
Then the child appeared on my security monitor.
She had long, tangled honey-brown hair with an enormous blue bow clipped crookedly above her ear. Her dress was the sort a mother might save for a birthday photograph: soft blue fabric, tiny white embroidered flowers, lace at the cuffs. Her shoes, however, were soaked. She held a transparent sandwich bag against her chest and stared at the merchandise as though she'd entered a country whose language she didn't speak.
No adult followed her through the doors.
I watched her approach Benji Park, our assistant floor manager. He leaned across the counter to listen. The girl turned the bag upside down, and coins spilled over the marble in a bright, embarrassing clatter. She smoothed two crumpled dollar bills, added several more, and began organizing pennies into earnest little lines.
Benji's smile vanished. I left my office.
By the time I reached the counter, security director Omar Price had positioned himself several feet behind the girl, keeping the curious customers at a respectful distance. Benji saw me and started to explain.
"I think she's lost, Mr. Sterling."
"I'm not lost," the girl corrected. "I took the number twelve bus. The driver said this is the big store with the flowers."
I crouched, careful not to loom over her. "What's your name?"
"Maisie Bell." She examined my watch and expensive jacket. "Do you work here, too?"
"I do. My name is Nathan."
"Are you the boss?"
"Sometimes. Benji is better at it."
That earned the faintest smile. Then she pointed at her little fortune. "I counted twice. It's fourteen dollars and sixty-two cents. The button isn't money." A pink plastic button sat among the coins. She moved it aside with great seriousness.
"What are you trying to buy, Maisie?"
"A daddy."
Behind me, somebody inhaled sharply. A customer lifted her phone. Omar stepped into her line of sight and politely asked her not to film a child.
Maisie continued, undeterred. "Not the one from my birthday pictures. A different one. He has to be good at fixing stuff, and he has to stay when he says he'll stay. Do you have one that costs this much?"
It would have been easy to offer some bright, foolish reassurance. Instead, I studied the girl's trembling fingers and the wet hem of her dress.
"What made you come here today?"
She glanced toward the front windows. Rain crawled down the glass in silver ropes. "My mommy needs help. She always fixes everything, but now she can't."
"Is she sick?"
Maisie nodded. "Yesterday her head hurt so much she couldn't make my lunch. She said she'd close her eyes for a little while."
Something tightened beneath my ribs. "Where is she now?"
"On the living-room floor."
Benji's expression changed. I kept my voice gentle. "Did she fall?"
"I heard a noise when I was coloring. Her cup broke." Maisie twisted the empty sandwich bag. "I put my blanket on her because she was cold. I tried cereal for dinner, but I spilled the milk. This morning I couldn't wake her up to clean it."
For years I'd told myself the worst telephone call of my life was behind me. Suddenly I was hearing my younger brother's voice again, calling on a night I'd ignored because work couldn't wait. I forced the memory aside. Maisie needed somebody who would act now.
I signaled to Omar. "Call emergency services. Unresponsive adult, possibly since yesterday. Stay on the line."
Omar already had his phone out. Benji brought a chair and a dry towel. Maisie backed away from both.
"Am I in trouble? Mommy says I'm never allowed on the bus alone. But I knew the number. We rode it when we bought my birthday shoes."
"You're not in trouble with me." I stayed crouched. "We need to find your home so doctors can help your mom. Can you tell us where you live?"
"The building with the red door and the painted birds." She swallowed. "On Hawthorne. Third floor. I know my apartment is three-oh-seven because Mommy made me practice."
Omar relayed the details. Dispatch asked for the nearest intersection. Maisie remembered a bakery named Golden Crust and the community garden opposite it. Benji found the probable address on a neighborhood map and confirmed it with the dispatcher.
"People are going there now," I told her.
Maisie's face crumpled. "But I didn't buy a daddy yet. What if they make me take Mommy somewhere without one?"
I hadn't cried in public since my brother's funeral. I nearly did then.
"Listen to me, Maisie. Help isn't something you have to buy. And right now your mom needs medical help most of all."
She looked at the money. "Then I wasted my whole jar."
"No." I gathered the coins without dropping a single one and put them back into the bag, leaving the pink button on top. "You came somewhere people could help. That's the important part."
Omar returned from the telephone. "Responders have the building. Police are checking the apartment."
Maisie climbed onto the chair, her wet shoes swinging above the floor. I asked Benji for a hot chocolate—not too hot—and a spare pair of children's slippers from our stockroom. He hurried away.
"Are you expensive?" Maisie asked me suddenly.
"What?"
"If you were a daddy, would you be expensive?"
I thought of my empty penthouse and the meals I ate standing over business reports. I thought of my brother Daniel, who'd once said that you could make a million dollars and still be a man nobody wanted to call.
"I don't think the right person would charge you," I said.
Her little hand crept across the counter and rested on my sleeve.
My phone vibrated. Omar had received an update. He read the message, and all the color left his face.
"Nathan," he said carefully. "They found her mother."
Maisie straightened. "Is she awake?"
May you like
Omar looked at me instead of answering.
And in that terrible second, I understood that fourteen dollars and sixty-two cents might be the only reason a five-year-old ever saw her mother again.
