Escort
Copyright© 2026 by Sandra Alek
Chapter 1
Deal with...
The kitchen smelled like old tea leaves and dampness coming through the peeling paint on the ceiling. The single bare light bulb flickered nervously, lighting up the battlefield covered with unpaid bills.
Helen slowly moved her spoon around in the bowl. The cheap cornflakes had long turned into tasteless mush floating in grayish milk. She had a master’s degree in archaeology — a person who could rebuild the daily life of a lost civilization from one piece of pottery — but right now she couldn’t even balance her own budget.
Across from her sat Andrew. In front of him was a piece of stale bread thickly spread with corn oil and heavily salted. The only treat they could afford this month.
“The car insurance is a week past due, Helen,” Andrew said quietly, without looking up. “If we get pulled over, that’s the end. And without the car, I can’t get to the clinic.”
“What about the loan?” Helen put the spoon down. The metal clink against the bowl sounded like a gunshot. “The bank sent the third notice. Our credit score is terrible. No decent lender will even open the door for us.”
“The social services center promised a full-time position,” Andrew sighed. His shoulders seemed to drop even lower. “But they won’t approve the budget for another six months. And the apartment ... the landlord won’t wait six months. He doesn’t care about my psychology degree or your excavations.”
“Six months,” Helen said with a bitter smile. “In six months we’ll be perfect material for future archaeologists. ‘A couple of educated people who starved to death in the middle of Brooklyn.’”
Andrew chewed the bread slowly, staring out the window at the dirty fire escape.
“You know who I saw on the news the other day? Steve Crowley. Remember him? From our high school.”
Helen frowned.
“That loud guy who always sat in the back? The one who mixed up Austria and Australia and barely graduated?”
“Yeah, him. Now he owns a huge logistics company. Private jet, house in the Hamptons ... Mr. multimillionaire.”
“Unbelievable,” Helen felt cold anger rising inside her. “We spent years in libraries, wrote dissertations, tried to make the world better, to understand the human mind ... and here we are. While that careless guy who couldn’t read a page without stumbling is making millions. It feels like a mistake in the system, Andrew.”
“Money changes people, Helen. Did you see his face in the interview? Pure smugness. I bet he doesn’t even remember how we let him copy our homework. To people like him, we’re just a tiny error in the data.”
Andrew went quiet and finished the last bite of bread. In the silence of the kitchen, they could hear a mouse scratching inside the wall. Suddenly his eyes lit up with a strange, feverish look.
“Wait ... Steve was completely in love with you back then. Remember how he followed you around after classes? You didn’t even glance at him.”
Helen made a face.
“Where are you going with this?”
“What’s twenty or thirty thousand dollars to him? Pocket change. The cost of one dinner at a fancy restaurant. If we contact him ... ask him for old times’ sake ... or at least ask him to co-sign a new loan?”
“You’re saying I should go beg that ... that ignorant guy?” Helen snapped.
“I’m saying we should survive,” Andrew said firmly. “Yes, it feels disgusting. Yes, he represents everything we hate about the world. But this might be our last chance. Let this ‘spoiled rich guy’ give something back to society for all the unfair luck he got.”
Helen looked at the stack of bills, then at the dirty spot on the ceiling. Her pride fought against her hunger.
“Okay,” she breathed out. “Find his contact information.”
The old phone book on their laptop looked like a graveyard of forgotten contacts. Andrew had been on the phone for an hour already, and with each call his face grew darker. The kitchen, sunk in evening half-darkness, felt even smaller and heavier.
“No, Mark, I understand ... Yes, we just wanted to say hi...” Andrew snapped the phone shut angrily before the other person finished speaking. “He won’t give it. Says Steve is a ‘very busy person’ and he doesn’t have the right to share his personal number without permission.”
Helen, nervously sorting through the stack of receipts, gave a bitter smile.
“You hear that? ‘Doesn’t have the right.’ As if Steve is some Greek god, not the guy who couldn’t solve a simple equation with one unknown in eighth grade. All of them in his circle are nice and cozy now. They’re scared that if we get close, we might take a crumb from their table.”
“It’s a wall of well-fed people protecting each other,” Andrew said, rubbing his temples. “I called Sarah, I called Tom. Sarah pretended she had another call waiting, and Tom started talking about privacy. People we used to share our last sandwich with in college! The moment one person from our group became a millionaire, they all built a wall around him. They’re afraid we’ll ruin their clean, perfect little world with our problems.”
“Disgusting,” Helen said, looking down at the cracked tile on the floor. “Science, psychology, humanism ... it all goes out the window when being close to someone with a fat wallet is at stake. They’re not protecting Steve. They’re protecting their own feeling of being important.”
Finally, after the tenth call — to some half-forgotten guy from the high school football team who was either too drunk or too lazy to play secretive — Andrew got the number.
He froze, staring at the screen. The digits looked like the combination to a safe.
“You call him,” he whispered. “You always had a magic effect on him.”
Helen picked up the phone. Her voice shook at first, but she forced herself to sound calm and sure. After five rings, a rough, confident voice answered — Steve. For a second she couldn’t speak. Then she pulled herself together. Short hello, fake laugh, quick reminder of “the good old days,” and finally the request to meet.
“He said yes,” Helen slowly lowered the phone. Her face was pale. “Thursday. Restaurant called L’Escale on Manhattan. Seven in the evening.”
“L’Escale?” Andrew gave a nervous laugh. “One appetizer there costs as much as our whole weekly budget. God, Helen, we don’t even have the right clothes for a place like that.”
“We’ll have to pull out whatever’s left from our ‘previous life’ and dust it off,” she said, looking at her hands, dry and rough from cheap dish soap. “We’ll pretend to be successful intellectuals who are just ‘temporarily unlucky.’ The main thing is not to let him smell it ... the smell of this kitchen.”
Three days passed in feverish waiting, like a long attack of the flu. Helen pulled her only silk dress out from the far corner of the closet — a leftover from the days when she still believed in academic cocktail parties. Andrew spent a long time cleaning his old shoes, trying to hide the cracks in the leather. In the small kitchen, the smells of cheap laundry detergent mixed with the expensive perfume Helen had kept for five years “for a special occasion.” The occasion had come, but it smelled not of victory, but of desperation.
The restaurant L’Escale greeted them with soft lighting, the smell of truffles, and the quiet clink of crystal glasses. It was an insulting, showy kind of luxury. The waiter, whose cufflinks cost more than their monthly rent, raised an eyebrow slightly at their outdated clothes. But when he heard the name Crowley, he immediately put on a professional smile and led them to a corner table.
Steve was already there. He lounged in a leather chair, sipping something amber from a heavy glass. Instead of the awkward teenager they remembered, a predator sat in front of them in a perfectly tailored suit.