The Shadow Tycoon
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 126: The Price Set at Home
That evening, after a full day’s work, Eleanor changed clothes with a tired heaviness and started home. She turned down several suitors who offered to give her a ride on their bicycles and insisted on walking back by herself.
The summer night wind carried little coolness against her face. Instead, it still held the last heat and temper of the day, a dry restlessness that made a person’s nerves itch.
Eleanor was a strong girl. She was not good at showing simple emotions, even when something else might be moving inside her.
Before the sky went completely dark, she returned home. Ever since she had moved back into her family’s house, she had never stayed out on the streets after nightfall.
This neighborhood was not safe. Once the night fully covered the sky, crime came down with it.
Arguments, fights, even gunshots were ordinary sounds here after dark. So were cries for help and the constant wail of police sirens.
The moment she shut the front door, Eleanor sensed that something was different. The air in the house felt unusually heavy tonight.
She changed her shoes, hung her bag worth no more than five dollars on the coat rack, and walked toward the living room.
Her father sat dazed on the battered sofa they had dragged back from a garbage heap. Her mother’s face was drawn tight with worry.
The man seemed not to have heard the door open and close. His eyes stayed fixed on the television. Eleanor’s mother, however, looked up at Eleanor, then lowered her head again.
“What happened?” Eleanor asked. The couple felt different from usual tonight.
The man continued watching television as though he had heard nothing. Eleanor’s mother wore a sorrowful, bitter expression, and even her voice trembled slightly. “Your father ... lost his job.”
It was a common enough thing. In fact, people had started preparing themselves for it in the second half of last year. Many plants had begun shutting down. Even when the labor unions organized workers to march and demonstrate, demanding that the plants reopen, they did not dare push too hard.
They had even scheduled their “strike” for the weekend. It became an international joke, but from another angle, it also showed just how contradictory and sharp the social problems had become.
Eleanor’s father’s plant had announced its bankruptcy that day. There had been signs. Starting last month, they had stopped bringing in raw materials. In truth, they had all sensed it coming, they simply had not wanted to face it, or believe that bad luck would land on their own heads.
Eleanor fell silent. Her wages were not high, only two hundred twenty-five dollars a month, barely above the floor required by the Minimum Wage Act.
Before today, her father had brought home between three hundred and three hundred fifty dollars a month. With both their wages, supporting the household had been more than manageable.
But if they had only Eleanor’s pay, supporting a family of three would be genuinely difficult.
Almost none of the plants were hiring now. Even when City Hall demanded that the plants add more jobs, they had not complied.
When profit was scarce, every employee became another weight on the wrong side of the scale before Death. Add one more, and the company moved one step closer to the grave.
A plant with a thousand workers had to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars every month in wages alone. If it lacked sufficient profit, payroll by itself could bankrupt it within a single month. So no firm would choose to expand staff at a time like this, no matter what City Hall demanded.
That also meant Eleanor’s father would have a hard time finding suitable long-term work through the employment center. There might be short-term jobs, or there might be nothing at all.
As for Eleanor’s mother, there was even less to say. She had no work experience. Even if she tried to learn now, there was no opportunity. In other words, the burden of keeping the family alive would fall entirely on Eleanor.
Her monthly wage of two hundred twenty-five dollars would become the household’s only source of income.
All three of them sank into silence. Eleanor’s father kept watching television, as though the shock had sealed him inside some small private world.
Eleanor’s mother looked miserable, sighing from time to time, her face full of worry for the future.
Eleanor felt tired. For the past few years, that had been the one sensation that never left her.
The feeling had been there before, but never this deep. Not until this moment did she feel the exhaustion settle all the way into her bones.
She was not a girl without experience of life or society. She knew very clearly that the present condition of herself and her family came from their family background, their social class, their education, and everything those things decided.
The education problem was the most obvious. If she had been able to attend college, or after high school had studied accounting or some other profession, she might now have had an entirely different job.
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