Chapter 2

"Listen carefully, Nina."

"Every guy who ever touched you. Every time you spread your legs. I know all of it."

"And I still married you."

"You know what that means?"

His voice was low.

"It means I, Ethan Ford, love you. Love you enough to swallow your filthiest parts."

My tears splashed onto the back of his hand.

He looked pleased. He pulled me into his chest, chin resting on the top of my head.

"Good girl. Stop crying. Marry me and nobody will ever bring that stuff up again."

He held me tight. I could feel his heartbeat thumping against my cheek.

I closed my eyes in his arms with one thought pounding in my head —

Not one word of what he said was true.

I never turned tricks.

But yeah — I had walked into that kind of place.

Seven years ago, I was eighteen, sleeping on a hallway bench in the hematology wing of St. Mary's Hospital for forty-seven nights straight.

My mom, Rose Shaw. Acute leukemia.

The day of the diagnosis, the doctor pulled me into his office and told me the bone marrow transplant plus follow-up care would run about two hundred thousand dollars.

Two hundred grand.

My dad died when I was six. He left us a leaky little house and about eight thousand in the bank.

I got through high school on scholarships. My entire savings was forty-two hundred bucks I'd earned pouring smoothies over summer break.

I begged at social services. Begged at the Red Cross. Begged the reviewers on every crowdfunding site out there.

I scraped together sixty-three thousand. A drop in the bucket.

Then someone slipped me an address.

88 Gold Street. A nightclub called The Velvet Room.

I went.

The madam took one look at me and asked how old I was.

"Eighteen."

She handed me a tight little cocktail dress and walked me up to a VIP room on the third floor.

"Pour drinks. Smile. Chat." She leaned on the doorframe, lit a cigarette. "That's it. Skinny thing like you, nobody's paying for extras anyway. Five hundred bucks a night. In or out?"

I was in.

Not a hooker. A hostess.

Pouring drinks. Lighting cigars. Getting yelled at. Getting force-fed shots. Getting my hand groped. Getting talked to like garbage.

But I never sold my body. Not once.

In forty-seven nights I worked thirty-nine shifts at The Velvet Room.

One night a drunk guy pinned me to a couch.

I kneed him in the balls. The floor manager docked me three days' pay.

"You don't like it? Walk," she said. "There's a line of girls outside dying to take your spot."

I didn't walk. My mom's surgery bill couldn't wait.

Off shift at 2 a.m., forty-minute walk back to the hospital, three hours of sleep on that hallway bench, up at six to make her rice porridge.

Once I had eighty thousand, plus the sixty-three I'd already raised, I scraped together enough for the first surgery payment.

The day the bone marrow match came back positive, I cried in a hospital stairwell for a solid twenty minutes.

Then I washed my face, went upstairs, and told my mom, "Guess what — the school scholarship came through."

And Ethan Ford? He met me on that same hallway.

He was visiting his grandfather in another wing. He walked past hematology and saw me curled up asleep on the bench.

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