Sinatra was crooning low through the busted speakers of my maroon sedan as I killed the engine at the curb. The air outside smelled like wet brick and old garbage—Chicago in early spring, when the wind still had teeth. On my dash, right above the cracked clock that was always five minutes slow, a tiny American-flag magnet clung to the plastic, sun-faded and stubborn, like it refused to quit on me.
I pressed my palm to the envelope in my coat pocket. Two hundred dollars in crisp twenties, sealed with the same little flag sticker I used every month. It wasn’t romantic.
It wasn’t noble. It was a receipt for grief. Today was the fifth.
The day I paid for a dead man. And I didn’t know yet that the building’s new camera on the fourth-floor landing was about to resurrect him. I’m Keisha Vaughn.
I’m thirty-two, a single mom, and I work long shifts that leave handprints on my life like dust on a hospital window. My son Malik is eight now—too old to be fooled by vague answers, too young to deserve any of this. Five years ago, my husband Marcus died on a job out in North Dakota.
That’s what everyone said. That’s what the paperwork said. That’s what the funeral director said when he handed me an urn that felt heavier than a truth should.
The day the call came, I was at work. It was one of those shifts where you forget what water tastes like because you never stop moving. A nurse called out sick.
Another one cried in the supply closet. Someone’s grandma kept asking if the Cubs had won. Then my phone lit up.
Unknown number. I stepped into the hallway by the vending machines, the kind that hum like they’re keeping secrets. “Mrs.
Gaines?” a man asked. My knees went loose before he even finished his sentence. After the funeral, after the casseroles and condolences and the way people stopped saying Marcus’s name like they’d used it up, his mother pointed a finger at me across their kitchen table.
“You made him leave,” Viola Gaines said, eyes red but voice steady. “You wanted more. You pushed him into that job.
Now we’re old, and we have nothing.”
Elijah, my father-in-law, sat there with his swollen knuckles wrapped around a coffee mug like it was a weapon. Viola continued, “We emptied our retirement to help him get started. Twelve thousand dollars.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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