She blinked rapidly. “Bring yourself back. That’s all I need.”
After dressing, they waited by the door. She gripped his hand, her hold cold and tight as if she were afraid to lose him in a crowd, but no one else was there. Her breath hitched and she crouched before him, tugging his jacket shut.
“Listen to me, Jackie. Be a good boy and do exactly as you’re told, understand?”
“I’m always a good boy, Mum,” he said cheekily, throwing his arms around her neck and squeezing tightly.
“I know you are, baby. I know you are.”
He should have held onto her a little longer.
Chapter One
One Night
Present Day
* * *
Steam wafted from the industrial pressers like breath from a dying animal—hot, damp, carrying traces of whatever had soiled the sheets before Daisy fed them through the machine. Sweat pooled in the hollow of her throat, slid between her breasts, gathered in the creases of her elbows where heat had turned her skin pink and angry.
Eight hours of this. Sometimes ten. Her hands knew the rhythm without her mind’s permission. Lift, feed, press, fold, stack. The familiar song of machinery no longer bothered her ears. She was as deaf to the white noise as she was to her own breathing.
The Royal Kensington Hotel laundered three thousand pounds of linens daily—the number painted on a sign above the service entrance, as if volume were a virtue. The guests who slept on these sheets would never see this room. They would never smell the chemical fog that clung to her hair and clothes, and probably the inside of her lungs.
They found other things in the linens, though. Things meant to disappear. Things she was safer not reporting.
Once, she’d found teeth. A molar with the root still attached, bloody at the tip. Maryanne, her co-worker, had simply crossed herself and carried it to the bin with a rag.
Minimum wage didn’t earn much more of a response than that. Menial workers only touched the evidence of other people’s lives. They were the invisible class, used and unseen. Necessary, but rarely acknowledged, and it was best not to attract attention.
“Daisy… Earth to Daisy.”
Blinking out of whatever daydream she’d been lost in, Daisy glanced at Maryanne apologetically. “Sorry, did you say something?”
Her co-worker stood at her elbow, dark brows drawn together. “You’re somewhere else today, mija. You eat breakfast this morning?” Her rheumatoid fingers lovingly clutched Daisy’s arm with a tenderness that made a knot tighten behind her ribs.
She hadn’t eaten this morning. Only half a tin of beans at nine o’clock the previous night. But she was used to working on nothing but tap water.
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Tired is not fine.” Maryanne made a gesture that somehow encompassed Daisy’s overall exhaustion, malnutrition, and the general grind of injustice that accompanied her total existence. “You come to dinner Sunday. I make ropa vieja.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“No arguing. You need meat on your bones.” She lowered her voice. “So you can find a man, mija. A good one.”
“I don’t want a man.”
Daisy’s life didn’t allow time to think about such things. Love required time she couldn’t dedicate when survival stole every moment of the day. And love always came with risks, risks that could so easily end in loss.
She’d lost enough.
“Don’t you want someone to make you feel good? Hmm?”
“I’m exhausted as it is, Maryanne.”
“That’s inexperience talking. Passion is the spice of life. It wakes you up naturally. There’s a reason I have six children.”
