Chapter 1

I worked myself into the ground at that company for twenty years, and the number on my pay stub never moved once.

I finally hit my limit and dropped my resignation letter on my boss's desk.

"I'm done with this job. The janitor makes more than I do."

But my boss stared at me like he had no idea what was happening. The papers stopped in his hand.

"You're leaving? You're giving up the twenty percent too?

I laughed at that. What shares?

Then he put a share certificate and a stack of dividend records down in front of me, and I found out somebody had been collecting 7 million dollars in dividends in my name.

*****

I had given that company twenty years of hard labor.

The number on my pay stub had been welded into place, and nothing ever moved it.

The new intern in accounting had a new handbag, and the whole break room was talking about it.

Meanwhile, I was still lying awake over next month's mortgage.

That day, the last straw landed.

The new cleaning lady told me, beaming, that she had been made permanent.

Her pay was 1,700 dollars a month.

I looked at the payday alert on my phone.

Mine said 1,600 dollars.

I had been there twenty years, and I earned less than a woman who had started that year.

Something caught fire in me and burned from the soles of my feet up through the top of my head.

That was enough.

I had had enough of all of it.

With a blank face, I opened my computer and typed out the words I'd been dying to write for twenty years.

It was my resignation letter.

There was no long speech in it.

It ran one sentence long.

[I quit.]

I printed it and signed it in one motion.

The paper was still warm from the printer, and for the first time, I didn't knock. I pushed open the door of my boss, Michael Turner's, office.

He was bent over a file, and he jumped when I came through the door.

Michael looked up. "Jane Evans? What's wrong?"

I didn't answer. I threw the paper down on his desk.

"I'm done with this garbage job." My voice shook with anger. "I make less than the cleaning lady. What am I doing here?"

Michael froze.

The file stopped in midair, and I had never seen that blank look on him before.

"You're leaving?" His brows pulled together, and he looked like a man trying to understand something impossible. "Why?"

The look he gave me pulled a laugh out of me, and there was nothing in it but anger.

"Why? Mr. Turner, you're asking me why?

"I came here at twenty, and I'm forty now. That's twenty whole years.

"When this place was barely holding on, I stayed up three nights straight with your father to land that contract.

"Now the company is public and making money, and you pay me 1,600 dollars a month.

"My son finished college this year, and he made more hauling bricks on a job site over the summer than I do."

Twenty years of swallowed anger came out of me at once, and I shouted every word of it at him.

The office went dead silent.

Michael looked at me, and there was too much in his eyes for me to read.

Some of it was shock, and some of it was confusion, and under that there was something that looked like pity.

He put the file down and stood up. "Jane, calm down for a minute."

"I'm calm." I looked straight at him and said each word slowly. "All I want is to get out of this place, because it makes me sick."

Michael said nothing.

He came around the desk, stopped in front of me, and his eyes were completely serious. "You're leaving?"

His voice was quiet, but it landed on me like a hammer.

"You're giving up your twenty percent too?"

I froze.

I had no idea what shares he meant.

I had to have misheard him.

Michael saw that I had no idea what he was talking about, which only confused him further. "You don't know?"

I laughed again, furious. "Know what? That you'd hold on to cheap labor with a lie like that? Mr. Turner, this isn't funny."

Michael ignored the sarcasm.

He turned and walked to the huge safe in the corner of the office.

He entered a code and scanned his fingerprint.

The heavy door opened with a click.

He took out a manila envelope and a thick binder.

He dropped both of them on the desk in front of me. "Look at it yourself."

I gave him a doubtful look.

Then I opened the manila envelope.

Inside it was a share transfer agreement.

Every line of it was there in black and white.

The name of the transferee was Jane Evans.

The transfer covered twenty percent of the company's original shares.

It was dated nineteen years earlier.

It carried the founder's signature in Michael's father's own hand, and the company seal was stamped across it.

A roaring sound filled my head, and everything in it went blank.

That couldn't be real.

I couldn't understand how I had never known.

Michael pushed the thick binder toward me.

"These are the dividend records for every year, and every shareholder is in there."

My hands shook as I opened the binder.

I found my own name quickly.

It said Jane Evans, twenty percent.

A long line of numbers ran after my name, and there were too many of them to take in at once.

Every payment was six figures, and some of them were seven.

They hadn't stopped once since the first year the company turned a profit.

I added them up in my head.

All of those dividends together came to more than seven million dollars.

It was seven million dollars.

It was more money than I had ever let myself imagine.

But there was a signature at the end of every record, on the line for whoever had collected the money in my place.

The signature was large and sweeping, and I knew it the way I knew my own hands.

I would have known that signature anywhere.

Someone had collected a full seven million dollars in dividends in my name.

And I already knew whose it was.