I gave the old lady some change every day. One day she stopped me and said, “Don’t go home tonight.”
That was how Simone Lawson would later describe the day everything in her life changed. Simone woke up to the sound of her alarm and for a few seconds couldn’t figure out where she was.
The empty half of the bed reminded her that the divorce had been finalized three months ago. The apartment in Atlanta belonged only to her now. Darnell had moved in with his new partner.
At thirty-five, her life felt split into a before and an after. Before, there had been twelve years of marriage, shared plans, and joint trips to his parents’ place outside the city, where she dutifully weeded the garden while he drank beer with his friends. After all that, there was just this one-bedroom apartment, the silence, and the necessity of starting over.
She got up, pulled on her robe, and went to the kitchen. The kettle boiled fast, the only thing in the entire apartment that worked flawlessly. Simone made herself coffee, looked out the window at the gray April morning over Atlanta, Georgia, and sighed.
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I’m sure you’ll love it if you keep listening till the end. Today was Monday, which meant a full week ahead at the small accounting office of a private firm called Prime Solutions Group. It was a grand name for a business of only five people cramped into two rooms on the third floor of an old commercial building in downtown Atlanta.
She had found the job through her friend Sierra, who knew someone who knew someone else. After the divorce, Simone had desperately needed money—for the lawyer, for utility bills, and for life in general. She’d had to leave her previous position at a large retail company.
Her former colleagues asked too many questions and gave her too many pitying looks. All she had wanted was to forget everything and start fresh. Here at Prime Solutions, no one knew her story, and that was a relief.
The director, Victor Sterling, a man in his fifties with a receding hairline and a perpetually dissatisfied expression, had hired her without asking too many questions. He looked at her degree, listened to a quick rundown of her experience, nodded, and named a salary. Nothing spectacular, but acceptable.
Simone had agreed right away. The work turned out to be straightforward: processing documents, preparing reports, keeping track of income and expenses. Nothing complicated for someone with fifteen years of experience in American corporate accounting.
Simone finished her coffee, got dressed, and left the apartment at exactly eight in the morning. The commute to the office took about forty minutes: ten minutes walking to the MARTA station, twenty minutes on the train, and another ten minutes to the building itself. It was the familiar route she had been taking every weekday for two and a half months.
Leaving her building, Simone turned right and walked down the narrow street toward the station entrance. Right by the door, sitting on a beat-up piece of cardboard, was an elderly woman. Simone had noticed her on the very first day of her new job.
