“The rich one?”
“Ben,” Adeline warned.
“What? She says her boss owns a house with bathrooms bigger than this apartment.”
Elias almost smiled despite everything. Adeline looked horrified.
“I never said—”
“You absolutely did.”
Elias removed his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. He was trying to make himself smaller, less threatening, and the effort was visible. “Your father saved my life.”
Silence filled the little room.
Adeline stared at him. “What?”
“Three years ago. Harbor Street. My SUV was hit at an intersection and caught fire. I was trapped inside.”
Her face slowly changed as the pieces connected.
“I was pinned,” Elias continued. “Your father pulled me through the passenger window. He dragged me twenty feet before the tank went up.”
Adeline sank down onto the edge of the couch. “He came home that morning with burns on his hands.”
“He refused money.”
“He hated charity.”
“I offered him a job.”
“He hated bosses too.”
Ben smiled faintly. “That sounds like Dad.”
Elias looked at the photograph for a long moment. “I searched for him after he disappeared. I put out word everywhere. Nobody knew his name.”
Adeline’s smile vanished. “He didn’t disappear.”
“What happened?”
“He got sick.”
Elias turned toward her sharply. “From the accident? The fire?”
“No.” She looked at Ben, and her voice went quiet. “Cancer.”
Ben lowered his eyes. The room seemed to shrink around them.
“We spent everything,” Adeline said. “Every dollar of savings went to the treatments. Dad died eleven months later. The medical bills took what was left. And then Ben got sick.”
Elias glanced at the bandage on the boy’s wrist. “What happened to him?”
Ben answered before his sister could stop him. “Kidney disease.”
Adeline shot him a look. “What? He asked.”
Elias understood the bread now. He understood the extra shifts, the fourteen-hour days, the coins counted at the pharmacy, the cheap dressings that hurt when changed. He understood the envelopes stamped FINAL NOTICE and the bucket catching rainwater in a Chelsea walk-up while his own house had bathrooms bigger than this entire apartment.
The woman Rourke Delaney had painted as a possible traitor was drowning in medical debt and stealing discarded bread to keep her sick brother fed.