Chapter 4 — Ask For Rhaney

She called on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays were laundry days, and laundry days meant Kora disappeared to the salon for two hours to have her roots done, and two hours was exactly enough time to be brave in. Rain sat on the floor of the laundry closet with her back against the dryer, phone pressed to her ear, heart going so hard she could feel it in her throat. It rang twice. "Cross Global, executive line, this is Rhaney." The voice was fast, warm, faintly amused, like whoever it belonged to found most of life mildly funny and hadn't yet found a reason to stop. "If this is about the Henderson account, I already told your boss we're not discussing it until Thursday." "I — no. Sorry. This isn't about an account." Rain's voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. "I was given this number. At a dinner. Someone said to ask for Rhaney." A pause. Then, sharper, more alert: "Which dinner?" "The Hartwell house. Two nights ago." Another pause — this one longer, and Rain could hear something shift on the other end, papers rustling, a chair creaking. "You're the girl who almost went down with the mushroom tray." Rain's face went hot. "That would be me." "Oh, thank God." Rhaney's laugh came through bright and immediate, the kind of laugh that made Rain's shoulders drop half an inch without her meaning them to. "He's been insufferable about it for two days. Kept saying he 'should've gotten a card to her sooner,' like the world was going to end if you didn't call by Friday. I told him rich men worrying about waitstaff was a new and troubling character development, but he didn't find that funny. He doesn't find most things funny, if I'm honest, but that's not really relevant to your situation." Rain sat very still, trying to follow a conversation that seemed to be moving at twice the speed her whole life usually moved. "I'm sorry — who kept saying that?" "Oh — right, sorry, you don't actually know his name, do you. Small oversight on our end." A pause, and when Rhaney spoke again there was something gentler underneath the bright chatter, like she'd caught herself. "Look — here's the short version. I noticed you at that dinner. The way you moved through that room without ever once bumping into a chair before that one incident, the way you kept the whole service running while your — while the family running it barely acknowledged you existed. I run hiring for the executive floor at Cross Global, and I am always, always looking for people who pay attention the way you clearly do. There's an opening in data verification. Doesn't require sight for most of it — it's audio transcription and detail work, and half our best people in that department are blind or low-vision, because turns out you people notice things sighted folks miss constantly. Pays real money. Real benefits. No family drama attached." Rain opened her mouth and nothing came out for a second. "I know it's a lot," Rhaney said, softer now. "Take your time." "Why me?" It was the only question that mattered, the only one Rain actually needed answered. "You don't know anything about me." "I know you served an entire dinner party with a chip in your shoulder the size of Meridian City and didn't let a single one of them see it," Rhaney said. "That's not nothing. That's actually most of the job." Rain laughed — a short, startled sound, unfamiliar in her own throat, because laughing wasn't something this house made room for very often. "Okay. Yes. I want — yes. What do I need to do?" "Interview. This Thursday, ten a.m., Cross Tower, sixty-first floor. Ask for me at the front desk, I'll walk you up myself so you don't have to deal with security being weird about the cane. Wear whatever, nobody up here dresses like they have taste anyway—" The closet door opened. Rain's whole body went rigid. She hadn't heard the front door. She hadn't heard footsteps. Kora's voice cut across the small space like a blade before Rain could even lower the phone. "Who are you talking to?" "I have to go," Rain said quickly, quietly, and ended the call before Rhaney could answer, before Kora could hear anything more than the tail end of a stranger's voice through the speaker. "Rain." Kora's voice had gone very flat, very careful — the tone that always preceded something worse than shouting. "Who was that." "No one. A wrong number." "Don't lie to me." Kora crossed the small closet in two steps and held out her hand, palm up, unmistakable. "Give me the phone." Rain's fingers tightened around it. This was, she understood with sudden clarity, the exact moment everything could go one of two ways — the moment where she could hand it over and let this whole strange, impossible morning dissolve back into nothing, or hold on and see what happened. "It was a job," she said, and heard her own voice come out steadier than she felt. "At Cross Global. A real job, with real pay. Someone offered me an interview." Silence. The particular silence Rain had learned, over sixteen years, to be more afraid of than any shouting. "Give me the phone," Kora said again. Rain handed it over. There wasn't a version of this morning where she didn't, not yet, not with sixteen years of practiced obedience sitting heavier in her hands than the phone ever had. Kora scrolled through the call log with quick, furious taps, found the number, and Rain heard the particular silence of someone doing math they didn't like the answer to. "Cross Global." Kora's voice had gone dangerously quiet. "You think they want you for anything real? You think a company like that hires the help's blind daughter because they see *potential*?" A short, humorless laugh. "They're doing this to embarrass us. Some rich man's guilty conscience over one clumsy dinner, and you're falling for it like it means something." "Maybe it does mean something." The words were out before Rain could stop them, quiet but unmistakably solid, the first time in longer than she could remember that she'd contradicted Kora directly and stood still while she did it. Kora's eyes narrowed. Whatever she saw in Rain's face in that moment — some new, unfamiliar steadiness — made her go very still, very calculating, the way she got right before she decided how much damage a punishment needed to do. "You are not," Kora said, slow and deliberate, "going to that interview." "Kora—" "I said no." She pocketed the phone, turned on her heel, and paused in the doorway just long enough to add, almost as an afterthought, almost gently, which was somehow the cruelest version of her voice yet: "I'm doing this for your own good, Rain. People like that don't want people like you. I'm saving you the humiliation of finding that out yourself." The door closed. Rain sat alone on the floor of the laundry closet, phone gone, interview slipping away before she'd even had the chance to properly want it, and felt something old and familiar settle back over her shoulders like a coat she'd never gotten to take off in the first place. She didn't cry. She'd stopped letting herself cry a long time ago. She sat very still instead, and thought about the sound of Rhaney's laugh, and the word *interview*, and the particular shape of ten digits she'd memorized so thoroughly they were probably still sitting somewhere in her mind even without the card to check them against. Kora had the phone. Kora did not have the number. Rain closed her eyes, and began, very carefully, to plan.