Chapter 1 - The Squeaky Wheel|
At 6:43 on Christmas Eve, twenty-seven-year-old Hannah Mercer pushed a secondhand stroller through the marble lobby of Whitmore Confections and prayed no one would see her.
The atrium tree rose three stories beneath the glass ceiling—white lights, silver ribbons, fake gold boxes stacked beneath it like a promise nobody had to keep. Hannah hurried past, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
Her daughter, ten-month-old Ellie, kicked happily under a faded fleece blanket patterned with yellow stars.
"You think this is pretty, huh, Peanut?" Hannah whispered, leaning low over the handlebar.
Ellie answered by chewing enthusiastically on the ear of a worn stuffed rabbit.
Hannah almost smiled. Almost.
Her phone still glowed in her pocket with the text message that had ruined her carefully arranged Christmas Eve. Mrs. Keller fell on the ice. Broken wrist. ER. So sorry, honey.
Mrs. Keller was her sitter. The backup daycare in North Knoxville had closed at noon for the holiday. The neighbor upstairs had already driven home to Kentucky. And Hannah could not miss tonight's shift.
Christmas Eve paid time and a half—money she desperately needed for rent and oil heat. More importantly, her shift supervisor had made the company policy brutally plain earlier that month: three attendance strikes meant immediate termination. Hannah already had two. One from the morning Ellie spiked a hundred-and-three fever, and one from the day the city bus line froze over during an ice storm.
There would not be a third strike.
So Ellie had come with her, hidden beneath a spare winter coat in the stroller. The only problem was the stroller’s front left wheel. It squeaked every six feet with a sharp, metallic chirp. Hannah hated that wheel. Tonight, in the vast, echoing lobby, it sounded as loud as a fire alarm.
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"Just stay quiet a little longer," Hannah murmured, stepping quickly into the service elevator.
As the steel doors began to slide shut, a hand shot through the sensor gap, forcing them open. Hannah caught her breath, pulling the fleece blanket higher over Ellie’s sleeping form.
