That morning, before the sun had even fully risen, Elena had sat at the small kitchen table and counted the money three times, not because she didn’t trust her math but because she couldn’t accept the truth it represented.
Wrinkled bills.
Uneven stacks.
The last scraps of her dignity spread out like evidence.
Six hundred dollars.
That was it.
Rent was overdue.
Her fridge held half a carton of milk, a jar of mustard, and two eggs she’d been stretching like they were gold.
And still, she folded the money, put it in her pocket, and made her choice.
Because two nights earlier, on her walk home from the diner where she worked double shifts, she had seen the motorcycle leaning behind a chain-link fence in a yard full of weeds, and something in her chest had tightened so sharply she’d almost stopped breathing.
