Chapter 1: Tamsin
My hands are screaming.
Truly. Not in some performative, poetic, flowery way. They are literally on fire—deep in the meat of my palms, radiating up through my wrists, settling into my forearms like someone's been using my tendons as guitar strings for the past eight hours. I flex my fingers over the chipped edge of my kitchen table and watch them tremble, the knuckles swollen and red at the joints, a bruise forming along the base of my right thumb where I dug into some finance bro's knotted trapezius for forty-five minutes straight while he complained about his Tesla's suspension and how hard it is to find a good personal trainer these days.
I should ice them. I should do about fifteen different things a responsible massage therapist does to maintain her own body—contrast baths, gentle stretching, maybe some self-myofascial release with the foam roller gathering dust in the corner. Instead, I'm eating ninety-nine-cent ramen out of a plastic bowl, the kind that tastes like salt and regret, while my laptop screen glows with my banking app like a tiny beacon of financial doom.
Current balance: $340.12.
I stare at the number, willing it to change through sheer force of desperation. It doesn't. It never does. The universe is not that generous.
My phone buzzes on the table, rattling against the warped wood. I already know what it is before I look.
FINAL NOTICE: Rent payment due in 7 days. Account currently $2,847 overdue. Failure to remit will result in eviction proceedings.
I set the phone down with deliberate care, like if I move too quickly the entire fragile structure of my life will collapse. Pick up my fork. Twirl another clump of noodles that have the texture of wet cardboard and the flavor of industrial sodium. The broth is lukewarm because my microwave is dying, making a grinding noise like it's chewing its own circuits every time I use it, and I can't afford to replace it because I can't afford to replace anything.
Seven days.
I do the math on my fingers, which is humiliating, but my brain is too fried to do it in my head. I have three clients booked this week at my daytime clinic—that's $180 after the house takes their cut. I have $340 in my account. Rent is $1,200, which means I'm short $2,847 total when you factor in the back payments, and that's not even counting the medical bills from when I sprained my wrist last year and had to go to urgent care because I couldn't afford to miss work.
The draft coming through the window behind me is cold enough that I'm wearing two sweatshirts and a pair of wool socks with holes in the heels. The radiator has been broken for a month. My landlord said he'd "get to it." He hasn't gotten to it. He's too busy sending automated eviction threats and cashing rent checks from the other tenants who can actually afford to live here.
I open a new browser tab out of pure habit, muscle memory at this point. Craigslist. Job boards. The same listings I've scrolled through a hundred times: retail positions that pay $12 an hour and require "flexible availability" which means they own your entire life, freelance gigs that want a master's degree and five years of experience for $15 per article, and approximately nine hundred ads for "models needed" that are definitely not modeling.
Then I see it.
After-Hours Specialist Needed. High pain threshold for deep-tissue work required. $5,000 signing bonus. Extreme confidentiality mandatory. Midnight shift, 3x weekly. Apex Wellness Clinic.
I stop chewing.
Read it again.
$5,000 signing bonus.
My brain does that thing where it completely flatlines, and then reboots, and then immediately fills with about sixty different alarm bells. Midnight shift. Extreme confidentiality. High pain threshold. This is either a scam, or I'm about to get trafficked, or both.
I click the listing anyway.
The job description is sparse. Almosttoosparse, the kind of deliberately vague language that makes my bullshit detector start howling. It lists the basics: licensed massage therapist required, minimum three years of deep-tissue experience, must be comfortable working with "high-profile clientele requiring discretion." There's a line about "physical resilience" and "tolerance for non-standard anatomical presentations," which is the kind of phrasing that makes me think either they're serving professional athletes with weird injuries, or something significantly weirder.
But then there's the salary breakdown.
$500 per session. Midnight to 3 AM. Three sessions per week.
I do the math again, this time on the calculator app because I don't trust my exhausted brain not to add an extra zero out of wishful thinking.
$1,500 per week.
$6,000 per month.
I set my phone down. Pick it up. Read the listing a third time, looking for the catch, because there's always a catch. Maybe they want me to work in a basement. Maybe "high-profile clientele" means mob bosses. Maybe "non-standard anatomical presentations" means I'm going to be giving massages to someone's illegal pet tiger, or a professional bodybuilder who's been injecting so many steroids his muscle tissue has turned into concrete.
But $5,000 up front.
That would cover my rent. All of it. The back payments, the current month, and I'd have enough left over to fix my fucking radiator and maybe—maybe—buy groceries that don't come in a cup with a foil lid.
I laugh. It comes out sharp and bitter, echoing in my dingy kitchen. The kind of laugh that means I've already made up my mind and I'm just pretending I haven't.
