Collins had me stay after closing on a Monday in the middle of November, which was unusual enough that I knew before he said a word he'd been planning this conversation rather than stumbling into it.
He wanted to talk about the office, he said, meaning the small back room where I kept the ledgers, the same promotion off the floor that had once lifted me out of the laundry at Cinder Island. He was thinking of giving me the keys outright, sole responsibility for ordering stock and handling the till reconciliation, nobody looking over my shoulder.
That's a lot of trust, I said, and he said he'd watched me handle worse for three years running without so much as a dropped decimal, and he figured a woman with my steadiness had earned the keys fair and square.
I stood there holding a stack of receipts I hadn't yet filed, and I thought about the easy path, the one where I thanked him, took the keys, and let the whole conversation end there, two months before it might become public that the woman everyone called steady had also once been called a liar in her own official file.
Before I take that, I said, there's something you should know, because I'd rather you hear it from me than read it somewhere later. In 1964 I tried to escape Cinder Island with three other women. I didn't choose to stay behind. I got stuck trying to leave, and for seventeen years I let people believe the better story instead of correcting it.
Collins set down the pen he'd been holding and didn't say anything for a long moment, long enough that I heard the compressor on the drink case kick on behind the counter. Why tell me now, he finally asked, when you could've just taken the job and said nothing.
Because I'm correcting the record with the people who keep it, I said, and that record might end up printed somewhere, and I didn't want you reading it from a stranger's typewriter before you heard it from me. I wanted one person in my life to have the true version straight from my mouth.
He turned the pen over twice in his fingers, thinking, and then said, I appreciate you telling me. But I can't give a woman with an unresolved file sole access to the till and the stockroom key, not with the bureau's name about to be attached to your name in a paper somewhere. It isn't about trusting you, it's about what I'd have to explain if anybody ever asked why I handed you that.
I understood, I said, and meant it, though something in my chest went hollow hearing it confirmed out loud. I'm not asking you to overlook it. I just wanted you to know before you decided.
He kept me on the floor at my same pay, same hours, same ledgers I'd always kept, and told me the promotion would wait, maybe indefinitely, maybe for good, depending on how the bureau's paperwork settled. I thanked him for not letting me go outright, and he looked almost offended at the idea that he would have.
Walking home that night past the dark hardware store windows, I turned over the one thought that kept trying to comfort me and that I kept refusing to let finish itself, that a sensational story about three missing women would be worth real money to a paper, and that I could trade it for exactly the kind of security I'd just lost.
I didn't call anyone. I went up to my room above the store, ate a cold supper standing at the window the way I had for years, and let the loss sit in me honestly, a real cost for a real choice, instead of trading it away for a windfall built on three women who had never asked to be anybody's story to sell.