Chapter 863: Little Prayers: Mama’s Secrets! "Mama prays a lot," Rory said finally. "She thinks I’m asleep, but I hear her through the walls. Sometimes she cries, too." My chest ached. I knew this feeling. Knew it in my bones. The helpless knowledge of a child who understood too much, who saw the cracks in the foundation that adults tried so desperately to hide. The kind of understanding that didn’t come with toys or bedtime stories—it came with late-night whispers and bills left open on the kitchen table. I’d been that child once. Lying in bed, listening to Mom work double shifts, watching her skip meals so Emma and Sarah and I could eat, learning to stay quiet about the bruises from bullies because Jack had threatened her job and making trouble would only make things harder for her. Children learned young who they needed to protect. Even when they were too small to do anything about it. Especially when they were too small to do anything about it. "Rory," I said gently. "Can you tell me what your mama prays for?" She hesitated. The bubbly little girl was still there, but now I could see the other one too—the one who had grown up too fast, who had learned to read utility bills over her mother’s shoulder, who knew what it meant when the car made that sound again. The one who knew the difference between wants and needs, because life had taught her with cruel efficiency. "Do you pinky promise it’s real?" she asked. "The wish thing? Pinky promises are serious." I extended my pinky. "Pinky promise." She wrapped her tiny finger around mine with fierce solemnity. A binding contract. The most sacred oath known to childhood. Then she rose up on her tiptoes, and I leaned down, and she cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered directly into my ear. The first thing she said made my face go red. I pulled back, staring at her. She was grinning—actually grinning—with the mischievous delight of someone who had just gotten away with something. Like she’d just dropped a grenade and skipped away before anyone could blame her. "What?" I managed. "Mama said that once. When she didn’t know I was listening." Rory giggled. "She was talking to Aunt May on the phone about a man she saw on TV." Rory giggled harder. "I don’t know what it means but I know it’s a grown-up thing so I thought maybe—" Charlotte, of course, looked like she was about to die from curiosity. Her eyes were practically sparkling. She was one second away from paying the child to repeat it louder. "That’s—" I cleared my throat, trying to compose myself while my dignity packed its bags and left the building. "That’s definitely a grown-up thing. Yes." "Is it a wish you can grant?" "Let’s..." I swallowed. "Let’s move on to the other wishes." "Okay!" She leaned in again, cupping her hands around her mouth, ready to deliver the next one like a tiny priestess offering secrets to the altar. This time she didn’t whisper something scandalous. This time she whispered the real prayers. The rent that was three months late. The landlord who kept threatening to change the locks. The car that needed repairs they couldn’t afford—the one that made scary sounds every time Mama drove it, like it was coughing up its last will and testament. The second job she’d had to quit because there was no one to watch Rory at night. The phone calls Mama took in the bathroom with the water running so Rory wouldn’t hear her voice crack. The current job she just got and can’t afford to lose it. The dad that ran way while she was still pregnant. The way Mama only ate half her dinner and said she wasn’t hungry, but Rory had seen her put the rest in the fridge for tomorrow. Like hunger was something you could schedule. Like it was a luxury item. The crying. Always the crying. Through the walls, when Mama thought everyone was asleep. Rory pulled back. Watched my face with those too-old eyes—eyes that belonged on someone who’d already lived through a divorce, a mortgage, and at least one devastating betrayal. Not a child who still had baby teeth. "Those are the real prayers," she said quietly. "The secret ones." My throat tightened. I could feel something heavy settle in my chest, something familiar and ugly. The kind of weight you carried when you grew up learning that love sometimes looked like sacrifice... and sacrifice usually looked like exhaustion. Before I could respond, a voice cut through our sacred moment of secrets sharing. "Aurora Maria Porter!" Rory winced. "Uh-oh. Whole name." A woman was hurrying toward our table, weaving between other diners with the practiced efficiency of someone who spent her life navigating tight spaces at speed—like she’d been dodging disaster for years and had gotten really good at it. Mid-thirties. Dark hair escaping from a practical ponytail. The same brown eyes as Rory, but tired—so deeply, profoundly tired that it seemed to come from her bones. Not the cute kind of tired people bragged about online. The real kind. The kind that didn’t go away with sleep, because it wasn’t physical. It was life. She was wearing the uniform of La Maison’s waitstaff, and now I understood where Rory had escaped from. Some back office, probably, where she was supposed to stay while her mother worked. Because the world was cruel, and babysitters were apparently priced like private jets. "I am so sorry," the woman said, reaching us and grabbing Rory’s hand. Her face was flushed with mortification; the kind of desperate embarrassment that came with the fear of consequences she couldn’t afford. Not the kind of embarrassment rich people got when their assistant booked the wrong vacation house. This was the kind that tasted like panic. "She was supposed to stay in the back. I don’t know how she got out here. She knows better than to bother guests—" "Mama, I wasn’t bothering them! I was talking to—" "I’m so sorry," the woman repeated, not even hearing Rory’s protest. Her words came out fast, stumbling over each other, as if she could outrun disaster by talking quicker. "Really, I apologize. I can have someone else take over your table if you want, I completely understand if you want to speak to the manager—" "There’s nothing to apologize for." She stopped. Blinked. Actually, looked at me for the first time. I watched it happen—the moment of recognition. Not of me, but of what I represented. The expensive suit. The corner booth. The half-empty bottle of wine that cost more than her weekly paycheck. The kind of table people walked past slowly just to imagine what it felt like to sit there. And Charlotte. Her eyes went wide as they landed on the woman sitting across from me. I saw the calculation happen in real-time, like a mental spreadsheet opening behind her eyes. This wasn’t just any rich couple. That was Charlotte Thompson. The Charlotte Thompson. The woman whose face was on business magazines and tech blogs and billboards across LA. CEO of Quantum Tech. One of the richest people in the country. The woman people quoted on LinkedIn right before they ruined their employees’ weekends. Hardly anyone in LA didn’t know Charlotte Thompson. And she was sitting here, clearly intimate with me, sharing wine and chocolate soufflé in a way that made their relationship obvious. More than acquaintances. More than relatives. The closeness between us screamed either they’re sleeping together or they’re about to overthrow a small nation. Yet I was looking at Vanessa like I was about to give her the best night of her life. I could see the confusion on her face. The dissonance. Men like me—or rather, men she assumed I was—didn’t look at women like her. Not with respect. Not with genuine attention. Not like she was a person and not a background character in someone else’s expensive night out. The wealthy guests she served every night looked through her like she was furniture. Like she was part of the décor—something polished, useful, and invisible unless it stopped working. The trust fund babies treated her like an inconvenience, like her existence was personally interrupting their tragic struggle of having too much money and not enough personality. The self-made millionaires were worse, wielding their success like a weapon, swinging it around to make everyone around them feel small—because nothing screams I’m secure like humiliating the waitress. I had Charlotte Thompson sitting next to me. I had looks that made her daughter think I was an angel. I had money dripping from every visible surface of my existence. By every rule she knew, every pattern she’d learned from years of serving the wealthy, I should have been looking at her like she was beneath me. Like she was a problem to be managed. Like her daughter’s intrusion was an offense worthy of complaint. But I was standing up. Actually standing. Rising from my seat like she was someone worth standing for.