Behind him, her daughter Sophie, only seven and still young enough to believe the world was mostly good, climbed up onto the cracked leather seat and gripped the handlebars like she was riding into a parade.
“My mom bought a motorcycle!” Sophie announced proudly to no one in particular. “A real one!”
Elena almost smiled, because children had a gift for seeing magic where adults only saw failure, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes, because the truth was simple and ugly.
She was forty-two years old.
She was widowed.
And she was drowning.
Three years earlier, her husband Graham Brooks had been killed in what the factory called an “accident,” though Elena had never been able to shake the feeling that the word was too clean for what really happened, too polite for the way they’d handed her a thin envelope, a condolence letter, and a small settlement that evaporated faster than smoke once rent, food, and medical bills started taking their share.
Graham had been the kind of man who could fix anything with his hands, who believed that broken machines and broken people deserved patience, who could take an engine apart and put it back together while humming softly under his breath like the world was a puzzle he enjoyed solving.
And now he was gone.
Leaving Elena with two children, one bedroom, and a constant fear that one missed paycheck would collapse everything.
