Page 5 of Stolen By the Billionaire
Sarah fished around in the produce baskets hanging above the kitchen counter and found a carrot. She chopped off its feathery greens, reserving those to cook for her supper, and scrubbed the dirt off before gnawing off bites while she cooked the rest of her breakfast.
Of the three eggs, she scrambled one, saving the other two in a hanging wire basket over her counter for when she needed to bake bread in a few days. The flour in the twenty-five-pound bag was getting low. Sarah would need to ask Abigail Yoder if she could borrow her Costco card to drive over to Coralville to buy more flour next week.
Sarah could put on a bonnet and pass for Amish. The membership checkers didn’t look too closely at anyone who dressed plain. Staring was rude.
And if she lugged the flour out to her beat-up pickup truck instead of a horse and buggy, then she must be Mennonite. It was also rude to be judgy about that.
Twenty-five-pound bags of flour cost fifteen bucks. If there was enough money in her bank account, she might be able to buy two, saving her a trip next month and thus gas.
She would need to save three or four eggs if she was going to make herself a cake for her birthday in a few weeks. Surely, a few of her high school friends might be able to take a break to eat some cake with her, but the number of her friends who could come dwindled every year. They were busy with their husbands and growing families.
Melinda Johnson had three kids. Tiffany Meeks had two and an ailing mother-in-law. Abigail Yoder had a toddler and a new baby.
Yeah, they probably wouldn’t be able to make it, anyway.
High school was a long time ago, five whole years before. Their lives had moved on.
Sarah probably didn’t need a cake.
She cut a piece of bread and ate it with her scrambled egg, not bothering to toast it. No use cooking anything fancy. She just had to survive until tomorrow and preserve enough produce to last her through the winter.
That was the goal: survive that day and the coming winter without losing her dad’s farm.
The empty chairs at the kitchen table made her ache with loneliness—her father’s chair at the head of the table, her mother’s to his right—but leaving the farm would be worse. The land was her farm now, the Bell family farm, and had been hers for the last several years. Her dad had farmed it, and so would she. Seeing it go to someone else or, more likely, a soulless corporation would be the absolute end of her.
Her phone chimed an alarm.
Dammit, it was eight-fifty already.
She’d been wool-gathering again, and not the productive kind where she ended up with some wool to knit herself a sweater with.
The consultation was going to net her thirty dollars. If she was late, she might not get paid.
Sarah grabbed her phone and ran upstairs to one of the unused bedrooms, snagging glittery robes off a nail in the wall and throwing them around her shoulders as she wedged her phone into the ring light stand and then settled behind the rickety table she’d covered with black chiffon cut from a friend’s old prom dress. She jammed a sequined turban on her head to cover her dark bangs and braid swinging down her back.
Her deck of tarot cards stood in the center of the black gauze.
She picked up the deck, schooling her face to look wise and serene as she waited for her client on the other end of the Zoom link to click in for his private tarot card reading.
Any time now.
Sarah shuffled the cards while the Zoom link circled, waiting for—she checked the scheduling app on her phone one more time because getting the name wrong would definitely reduce her tip—Jack Marble.
Hi, Jack! Hi, Mr. Marble! Hello to Jack Marble from the spirit realm, she practiced in her head.
Any time now, Jack Marble. You’re late.
Outside her tiny studio, a creak sighed from the squeaky stair step, the fourth one from the top.
The sound traveled, even through the closed door.
Muffintop wasn’t heavy enough to make the stairs squeak.
Was someone in her house?
If a neighbor had stopped by, they would’ve yelled for Sarah from the living room when they walked in.
A neighbor wouldn’t have come up the stairs without hollering. Everyone around owned varmint guns. Walking into someone’s house without announcing oneself would likely be ruled death by stupidity.
