THE DAY KINDNESS CHANGED TWO FAMILIES
Jonathan Anderson was the kind of man people only saw on magazine covers and business channels. Billionaire. CEO.
Mansion on a hill. Everything in his world looked polished, efficient, and perfectly under control. Everything—except the parts he didn’t bother to look at.
Like who cleaned the floors. It was a bright morning when he walked into his bedroom and froze. Sunlight poured through the tall windows, lighting up the white sheets of his expensive bed.
And there, asleep on top of the covers, still in her wrinkled black-and-white uniform, was Sophie. Her hand was still wrapped around a mop handle like it was a lifeline. A bucket sat tipped over on the floor.
She wasn’t sprawled out in comfort. She was curled into herself, the way a person looks when sleep finally ambushes them after fighting it too long. Jonathan didn’t shout.
He stepped closer. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Small.
Thin. The kind of exhausted that doesn’t come from laziness, but from carrying too much for too long. He reached out and gently touched her shoulder.
“Sophie?”
She jolted awake like she’d been electrocuted. The moment she saw who was standing in front of her, she slid off the bed and fell to her knees, holding the mop like a shield. “I’m sorry, sir.
Please, I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t sleeping, I just… I stayed up all night with my mother, she’s sick, and I had to come today, it’s the end of the month, I need my salary, please don’t fire me—please.”
The words tumbled out, tangled with tears.
Jonathan watched her. Not as a CEO. Just as a man.
“Sophie,” he said quietly, “why didn’t you sleep last night?”
She swallowed, eyes fixed on the floor. “My mother’s been unwell for a long time,” she whispered. “She got worse this week.
I stayed up to look after her. She doesn’t stop coughing at night. I couldn’t sleep.
But if I don’t show up to work, I don’t get paid. If I don’t get paid, she doesn’t get medicine.”
Jonathan felt something heavy settle in his chest. “And your father?” he asked gently.
Her face tightened. “He was a taxi driver. There was an accident when I was fourteen.
He never came home.” She paused. “It’s just me and my mom now.”
Jonathan didn’t interrupt. “I was top of my class in secondary school,” Sophie said, wiping her face quickly, embarrassed by her own tears.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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