Weird. “What are you—”
He said, “I apologize. I didn’t understand the situation last night. That should cover my tab, right?”
Dree squinted at him. She had missed something. “Your—your tab?”
Augustine resumed tearing a pastry apart and slathering it with butter and jam. “For last night. I apologize for leaving without settling the bill, but all’s well that ends well.”
“Wait, the bill?” He thought—oh, there was no way he thought she was a— “Are you kidding me?”
He thumbed through his wallet again and added another green euro note to the stack. “Is that enough? Extra charge for the monster, huh? It’s fine. I’ve paid that before.”
Dree yelled at him, “Auggie, I am not a prostitute!”
He paused and swallowed the bite he was chewing. “I don’t understand.”
“I wasn’t telling you a sob story to get money out of you. I was being open and honest and vulnerable.” Anger swelled in her throat. “I am not a ‘temporarily inconvenienced millionaire’ who’s asking you for money. I’ve just been poor my whole life, and now I’m poor again. But that doesn’t mean I’m a wh—” She swallowed because she couldn’t quite say the horrible word. “A wh—A lady of the evening!”
“I apologize again,” Augustine said with one eyebrow arched high. “Should I take the money back?”
“Yes! Yes, you should take it back! I’m not a prostitute, and you shouldn’t try to pay me for what we did last night. I would never—I would absolutely never—”
And she stopped, blinking, and looked at the money lying on top of the dresser.
Augustine hadn’t moved to take it back yet.
When Dree was in nursing school, a lot of her friends had danced on tables a couple of times when they couldn’t quite make it to the end of the month on the pittance from student loans they lived on. They had joked about blowing guys for beer money, but she had thought they hadn’t actually done it.
Now she was less sure.
That was a lot of money up there. When she got back to Phoenix, she wouldn’t have enough money to make rent on the first of next month, and she didn’t have a bed in her bare apartment. She wasn’t sure Francis hadn’t broken her lease to get at her deposit, too. She might have nowhere to live when she got back. Francis had cleaned out all Dree’s bank accounts, even the one she shared with her sister, which was the most important one.
If Dree ended up bashing Francis’s head in with a fireplace poker or a branding iron, that would be why. Stealing money from her sister Mandi and Mandi’s kid was just frickin’ reprehensible.
And Holy Mary, Mother of God, Christmas was coming. People in her family depended on her cash Christmas presents to get them through because they’d used their food money to buy presents for their kids and other people. If she didn’t have that—
Her chest knotted.
Dree should take Augustine’s money.
She’d been stupid for protesting it. That cash he’d laid up there without a second thought could go a long way toward food for the next few days and then helping her start a new life.
He asked, “Should I take it back?”
Dree ran one hand up the side of her face, thinking about how much money was sitting over there. It looked like at least six hundred euros, which was somewhere north of seven hundred dollars, American.
She thought about what that money would mean to her sister.
But when Dree got back to Phoenix, she would still have her job. She could figure out some way to get a loan from somewhere, and then she could pick up extra shifts to make sure Mandi had enough money.
It just might be next month.
She finally said, “You should take it back. I’m not a prostitute, and I never meant anything I said that way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sex work is work.”
Augustine reached for the bills on the dresser. “Of course.”
Sex workers came into her ER all the time with anything from the problems you would expect to sprains and broken bones from abusive customers to ear infections and tonsillitis, and they brought their kids for the usual childhood complaints. There was one lady of the evening named Melinda Williams, her legal name was David Williams, who had three of the sweetest, cheerfullest, cleanest little kids you can imagine. Dree never saw normal childhood dirt on any of those kids. Yes, ma’am and no, ma’am and showing off how well they did in school and pictures from when Melinda chaperoned their school field trips with them, but she couldn’t afford health insurance and so ended up in the ER with them too often.
Dree said to Augustine, “Obviously, you were fine with it. You even knew the going rate.”
He shrugged and put his wallet back in his pocket.
“I mean, Jesus hung out with prostitutes, drunks, and tax collectors, right?”
Augustine reared back for a second, but then recovered. “That’s one interpretation, though I always thought misogynists were trying to smear the reputation of Mary Magdalene to reduce her importance in the New Testament. But that is one interpretation, and one could do worse than to emulate the Son of God, as best one can.”
His frown had turned sad as he stared at his breakfast.
Dree kept thinking about that money.
He finally asked, “You said you’d encountered a problem?”
She didn’t want to admit how stupid she’d been, but she was changing her life. Old-Dree would have hidden what had happened to her out of mortified embarrassment.
But she was trying to be someone else, someone better.
Someone strong enough to be honest, even when she was embarrassed.
Okay, here it went.
She said, “On the day before yesterday—I think it was the day before yesterday. I was on the plane for so long and with all the time zone changes, I don’t know what day I should call it. Anyway, I was on my way home from work after a fifteen-hour
