CHAPTER 1 The Cleaning Lady Thought She Was Only Helping Lost Twins Until They Called Her Mommy in Front of Their Millionaire Father
The Cleaning Lady Thought She Was Only Helping Lost Twins Until They Called Her Mommy in Front of Their Millionaire Father
Valerie Monroe had been awake for eighteen hours when two little girls ran into her arms on Wall Street and shouted a word she had not heard directed at her in her entire life.
Mommy.
The word cracked through the evening noise like a gunshot.
Taxis screamed. Men in thousand-dollar suits kept walking. A bicycle courier cursed under his breath as he swerved around a black town car. Somewhere above them, glass towers reflected a burning orange sunset over lower Manhattan.
But for one impossible second, the whole city seemed to stop.
Valerie stood frozen in her faded blue cleaning uniform, her shoulders aching, her knees bruised from scrubbing executive bathrooms, her hair coming loose from a cheap elastic band. She looked down at the twin girls clinging to her legs as if the sidewalk beneath them might open and swallow them whole.
They were five, maybe six. Identical except for the colors of their dresses. One wore pale yellow. The other wore red. Their blonde hair was tied with white ribbons that looked too perfect for real life. Their shoes shone like black mirrors. Their dresses probably cost more than Valerie’s rent.
Both of them were sobbing into her uniform.
“Mommy, don’t leave,” the girl in yellow cried.
“Please stay, Mommy,” the girl in red begged.
Across from them stood Franklin Buchanan, one of the richest men in New York, though Valerie did not know that yet. She only saw a tall man in a ruined charcoal suit, his tie half loose, his face pale with panic and something deeper than fear.
He looked as if the children had not just spoken a word.
He looked as if they had opened a grave.
“Girls,” he whispered. “Please.”
Valerie’s hands hovered uselessly in the air. She wanted to explain. She wanted to tell him she had never encouraged this, never asked for it, never even imagined a child like them would look at a woman like her and see anything but the help.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, her voice shaking. “I didn’t tell them to call me that. I swear I didn’t.”
Franklin stared at her for a long moment, but his eyes were not angry anymore. The anger had burned out as quickly as it had come. What remained was exhaustion, terror, and a grief so old it seemed carved into the lines beside his mouth.
“I know,” he said.
Only half an hour earlier, Valerie had wanted nothing more than to disappear into the subway crowd and go home.
She had spent the day cleaning the thirty-ninth through forty-second floors of Buchanan Global, though at the time the name meant nothing to her except another building with too much glass and too many fingerprints. She had emptied trash cans full of shredded contracts, polished conference tables where men argued over numbers larger than her whole life, scrubbed coffee stains from marble floors, and inhaled enough lemon disinfectant to make her throat burn.
By seven, her back felt broken.
Her mother, Alice, would be waiting in their small East New York apartment, pretending not to worry, pretending the swelling in her feet was not getting worse, pretending her insulin would last until Friday.
Valerie had just stepped outside, counting the few crumpled bills in her pocket and wondering whether rice and canned beans could stretch two more nights, when she heard crying.
At first she thought it was a baby in a stroller.
Then she saw them.
Two little girls standing near the curb, holding hands so tightly their knuckles were white. People flowed around them like water around stones. Not one person stopped.
Valerie stopped.
Then she saw a bus lurch forward, saw the girl in yellow take one frightened step toward the street, and Valerie moved before she thought.
“Hey!” she shouted, cutting across the sidewalk. “Sweethearts, stop right there.”
A delivery cyclist shouted at her when she darted into his path, but she barely heard him. She reached the girls and dropped to her knees.
“Hi,” she said, breathing hard. “Hi, honey. You’re okay. You’re safe.”
The girl in red sniffed and lifted her chin, trying to look brave. “We’re not supposed to talk to strangers.”
“That is a very good rule,” Valerie said. “Your grown-ups taught you well. My name is Valerie, and I’m going to help you find them. What are your names?”
The girl in yellow wiped her cheek with the back of her tiny hand. “I’m Vanessa.”
“I’m Ashley,” said the girl in red. “And I’m not scared.”
Vanessa immediately burst into another sob.
Valerie’s heart twisted.
“Of course you’re not,” Valerie said gently. “You’re just having a very hard minute.”
Ashley looked at her, suspicious and desperate at the same time. “Daddy told us to stand still.”
“Where did Daddy go?”
“To answer a phone call,” Vanessa whispered. “A man came out of the building and said something was urgent. Daddy said, ‘Do not move one inch.’ But then there was a pigeon.”
“A very shiny pigeon,” Ashley added miserably.
“And we followed it.”
“Only a little.”
“Then we couldn’t find Daddy.”
Valerie glanced around, searching for a frantic parent, a nanny, a security guard. No one. Just Wall Street at rush hour, cold and busy and blind.
May you like
She guided the girls away from the curb and sat them on the marble steps of an investment bank. A peanut vendor nearby was packing up his cart, and the warm smell of honey-roasted nuts drifted through the evening air.
“Are you hungry?” Valerie asked.
