A Simple Life With Ransom?

She cinched the rope around her trunk with determined fingers and sat hard on the lid to snap the clasps into place. The braided rug scraped her ankles where her stockings had already gone threadbare. A faint scent of stewed cabbage hovered in the air: Mrs. Zhivana downstairs cooked for boarders, and Sally supposed she'd miss the old woman's muttered prayers and sloshing of soup pots—or perhaps not, given how many dinners she'd had to choke down through gritted teeth.

She pulled her only nice shawl tighter across her chest and pressed her brow to the window. It was just past dawn. Lamplight flickered on the next block, but the streets below were empty but for a rag picker shoving a barrow through reeking slush. She'd grown up believing cities were meant to be dazzling, even magical. Maybe New York was, in some boarding house she couldn't afford, but not in this leaky, cracked little corner of the Lower East Side.

Sally folded and put in one area of her rented room, all of the things she would leave behind, just in case someone else could use them. It wasn't much, but she hated to waste things.

A knock sounded at the door, sharp and quick. Sally startled, snapped to attention, and tamped down the fear that some policeman had come looking for her. Only Mrs. Zhivana, trembling on her cane and wrapped in a heavy scarf, poked her head in.