Subtotal: $185.50.
Tip: $0.00.
Total: $185.50.
He had drawn a line through the tip section, a hard, dark line. Sarah stared at it. The room seemed to spin. Zero. After the lemon rind, the shallots, the insults, the interrogation about her life, he left nothing.
“Ouch.”
Jessica’s voice came from behind her. Sarah turned to see her rival peering over her shoulder.
“I told you, didn’t I? The Ice King strikes again. Zero tip on a $200 tab. That’s brutal even for him.”
“He… he left nothing,” Sarah whispered, her hands shaking. “That tip should have been at least $30. That was Leo’s inhaler. That was groceries for three days.”
“Well, clear the table!” Henderson shouted from the front of the house. “We have a walk-in party of four waiting. Move it, Miller!”
Sarah swallowed the lump in her throat. She felt a mix of humiliation and pure, white-hot rage. She wanted to scream. She wanted to chase Ethan Sterling into the parking lot and throw the receipt in his face. But she couldn’t. She was just a waitress. He was a billionaire.
She grabbed a bus tub and walked back to the table. She stacked the plate angrily. She grabbed the napkin he had used to wipe his mouth. And that’s when she saw it.
Under the charger plate—the large decorative plate that the dinner plate sat on—there was something white. It wasn’t a napkin. It was a folded piece of thick, expensive stationery.
Sarah frowned. She looked around to make sure no one was watching. She slipped the paper into her hand and unfolded it. It wasn’t money. There was no cash hidden inside. It was just a note written in elegant, sharp cursive with a fountain pen.
Sarah. You claim you will do whatever it takes. Prove it. Be at the Pier 59 shipping warehouse at midnight. Come alone.
Sarah stared at the words. The ink was still fresh, glistening slightly under the dim restaurant lights.
“What is that?” Jessica asked, stepping closer, her eyes narrowing.
“Nothing,” Sarah said quickly, crumpling the note and shoving it into her apron pocket next to the final notice from the pharmacy. “Just… trash. He left trash. Typical.”
Jessica sneered. “Clean it up. I need this table.”
Sarah finished clearing the table mechanically. But her mind was racing. Pier 59. At midnight. It sounded like the beginning of a horror movie. It was dangerous. It was insane. Ethan Sterling was a billionaire, but that didn’t mean he was a good man. Why would he want her to go to a shipping warehouse in the middle of the night?
But then she remembered his words: You’re relying on the kindness of strangers. That’s a poor strategy. And she remembered the zero dollars on the receipt. Maybe he was mocking her. Maybe he wanted to humiliate her further.
Or maybe, just maybe, this was the strategy he was talking about. She touched her pocket. She felt the outline of the pharmacy bill. She thought of Leo’s wheezing cough when she kissed him goodbye that morning.
She checked the clock on the wall. It was 10:45 PM. Her shift ended at 11:00. She had a choice to make. Go home, accept the defeat, and beg the pharmacist for an extension tomorrow. Or go to Pier 59 and see what the devil wanted.
Sarah Miller untied her apron. She had never been a gambler. But for Leo, she would walk into hell itself.
The Seattle waterfront at midnight was a different world than the polished interior of Le Jardin. The fog rolled in off the Puget Sound, thick and smelling of brine and diesel fuel. Sarah pulled her thin coat tighter around her shoulders. She had taken two buses to get here, and the walk from the nearest stop had taken twenty minutes through a district of warehouses that looked abandoned and menacing.
Pier 59 was a massive structure of corrugated metal and concrete. A single floodlight illuminated a side door. A black SUV with tinted windows was parked next to it, the engine idling silently.
Sarah checked her phone. 11:58 PM.
“I must be insane,” she muttered to herself. Her feet still throbbed from the shift, but the adrenaline was masking the pain. She thought of Leo’s face when he couldn’t catch his breath. That image was the fuel that kept her moving.
She walked up to the black SUV. The window rolled down. A man with a thick neck and an earpiece looked at her.
“Name?”
“Sarah. Sarah Miller.”
The man spoke into his wrist. “Package is here.” He nodded at the metal door. “Go inside. Keep walking until you see the light.”
Sarah swallowed hard. She pushed open the heavy steel door. Inside, the warehouse was cavernous. It was filled with rows of shipping containers, stacked three high. The air was cold.
In the center of the vast space, under a hanging bank of industrial lights, stood a folding table and two chairs. Ethan Sterling was sitting there. He wasn’t wearing his suit jacket anymore. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing forearms that were surprisingly muscular. He was reading a document, a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose. He didn’t look up as she approached.
“You’re two minutes early,” he said.
“If you’re on time, you’re late,” Sarah replied, repeating a phrase her father used to say.
Ethan looked up over the rim of his glasses. A flicker of amusement—or perhaps respect—crossed his face. “Sit.”
Sarah sat. The metal chair was cold.
“Why am I here, Mr. Sterling?” she asked, keeping her voice steady despite her trembling hands. “Is this about the service? Because if you’re going to fire me, you could have just called the restaurant.”
Ethan placed the document down. “I don’t care about the service, Sarah. The service was mediocre. The food was adequate. But you… You were interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“I tested you,” Ethan said, leaning back. “I made ridiculous demands. I insulted your profession. I questioned your life choices. Most people would have crumbled. They would have cried, or they would have spit in my food. You did neither. You executed the task with precision, despite your obvious anger.”
He reached into a briefcase on the floor and pulled out a stack of papers. He slammed them onto the table.
“This,” he said, tapping the stack, “is the shipping manifest for my logistics division for the last quarter. We are losing money. Significant amounts. My board says it’s market fluctuation. My CFO says it’s fuel costs. I think they are all incompetent or lying.”
He looked her dead in the eye. “You noticed the rind on a lemon slice in a dark restaurant. You noticed I was left-handed and placed the wine glass accordingly. You have an eye for detail that my Ivy League executives lack because they are too busy looking at the big picture to see the cracks in the foundation.”
Sarah stared at the papers. “You want me to… look at your shipping logs?”…
