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the bursar’s office further about it, she’d been told she’d have to direct any further questions to the bursar herself, who wouldn’t be in until the following Monday.
    Unfortunately, Lacey also had to drive back another forty-eight hours in order to be at work the next Monday, so there was no way she could stick around to talk to the bursar. She’d had to settle for leaving a message and waiting for the bursar to call her back which hadn’t happened until 9:45am mountain time, which was 10:45am her time, only fifteen minutes before the first half of her eleven a.m. to eight p.m. shift.
    “If you’d like to write a thank you note, I’d be happy to pass it along to the donor.”
    “Okay,” Lacey said, “I guess I’ll do that. “
    She hung up the phone with her stomach churning. She should be over the moon that she’d no longer have to live hand to mouth to pay for Rise Academy next year, but something about this situation just didn’t sit right with her.
    An image of Suro rose in her mind’s eye. It was him. It had to be him. But why after the way she had treated him?
    She still felt guilty every time she thought about it. Sparkle had thrown the fit to end all fits in the back seat when she realized they were going back to Chicago, and not to have lunch with Kenji and Suro as she’d been promised. She could only imagine how Kenji had reacted. And the last thing she ever wanted to do was trigger another Aspie kid.
    But she’d felt she had no choice. Despite the short time she’d known Suro, she had already pegged him as a man who didn’t take no for an answer. If she’d tried to turn down his lunch invitation, there would have been questions. But if she had accepted it, there would have been…
    She let that thought trail off. She couldn’t afford to think of what might have been. She had lost that privilege long ago when she had defied her father and made the stupidest decision of her entire life and then gotten pregnant as a result.
    “You’re too friendly, girl,” she heard him say once again.
    But she had been the opposite of friendly to Suro. She’d stood him up. So why then was she surer than sure he was the anonymous donor who’d paid Sparkle’s tuition? A sharp knock sounded on the door, interrupting her thoughts.
    Tony Delano, the balding and gray owner of the club she worked at, didn’t wait for her to answer before barging in. “What’s up! What’s going on, kid?” he asked, his New York accent still in full affect even though he’d been living in Chicago for over half his life.
    “Hey, Tony,” she said, unable to keep the dejection out of her voice.
    His face fell. “Did you already hear? Who told you?”
    She shook her head, confused. “Told me what?”
    “Today’s my last day at the club,” he answered. “As of tomorrow. We’re under new ownership.”
    “What?” she asked, her heart stopping. It was insanely hard to find a job that paid enough to put an autistic daughter through boarding school and could pay her under the table. The only reason she got paid as much as she did was because she not only managed the club and acted as a superintendent for the two floors of apartments above it, but also did all of its “creative accounting”—that was what Tony called it when he came in with shoe boxes of money that needed to disappear into the club’s coffers so the IRS couldn’t trace it.
    She didn’t ask too many questions about the money and Tony didn’t ask too many questions about why someone with a background in accounting would be willing to work and manage a strip club for under-the-table pay. Relationships like theirs were hard to come by.
    Tony, despite his shady side dealings, was a grandfatherly mensch. Who knew what the next guy would be like?
    “What happened? And why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
    “Because it just happened. Big black guy walks in here last night with a bag of cash, asks a few questions, says him and his partner will take the