Part 1

 

There are two rules in my life.

Rule number one: We are ghosts. My mom, Elena, taught me this one. We float through the lives of the wealthy, silent and invisible. We clean their messes, polish their silver, and see their secrets, but we are never, ever seen.

Rule number two: Don’t make waves. This one was self-taught, learned in the shark-infested hallways of Blackwood Academy, the elite private school I attend on a scholarship that feels more like a leash. At Blackwood, you’re either a predator or prey. There is no in-between.

My mom and I, we live in the guest cottage on the Vance estate. The Vances. As in, Marcus Vance, the man who practically owns downtown Chicago. My mom has been his head housekeeper since before I was born. I’ve grown up in the shadow of his granite mansion, breathing in the scent of lemon polish and old money.

And I’ve grown up in the shadow of his son, Leo Vance.

To the world, Leo is the heir. To the kids at Blackwood, he’s a target. To me… he’s just the boy I’ve watched my entire life, standing alone in a house full of people, his hands always trembling.

They call him “Shaky.”

It’s creative, in a cruel, teenage-boy kind of way. Leo has an anxiety disorder. It’s not a secret, but at Blackwood, it’s a blood-in-the-water liability. His hands tremble when he’s stressed, which, at Blackwood, is always.

My mom’s voice is a permanent whisper in my head. “Mija, keep your head down. We don’t make trouble. We are grateful, yes? This job, this school… it’s everything. Don’t lose it.”

Losing it meant losing our home. Losing my future. All I had to do was be a ghost.

Until that Tuesday in the cafeteria.

The room smelled, as it always did, of stale pizza and entitlement. I was in my usual corner, nursing a carton of milk and trying to make my textbook look interesting. The noise level was a familiar roar, until it wasn’t.

It went quiet. The kind of quiet that means a predator has found its prey.

I looked up.

Leo Vance was holding his lunch tray. And in front of him was Chase Harding. Chase—captain of the lacrosse team, son of a rival billionaire, and possessing the moral compass of a rattlesnake.

“Watch where you’re going, Shaky,” Chase sneered, loud enough for the whole room to hear. He nudged Leo’s tray.

Leo, pale and trembling, just tried to move past. “Sorry, Chase.”

“What’s that? I can’t hear you over the earthquake,” another boy, one of Chase’s disciples, chimed in.

Laughter. Sharp, bright, and cruel.

And then, the phones came out. Dozens of them. Little red lights blinking, all pointed at Leo. They were waiting for the show.

“Careful, Shaky,” Chase said, his voice a low growl. He put a hand on Leo’s tray. “You might spill.”

And he shoved it.

The tray didn’t just fall. It clattered. The milk carton exploded, a white splash painting the front of Leo’s $800 blazer. The Jell-O cup skidded across the floor. The thud of the tray hitting the linoleum was like a gunshot.

The cafeteria erupted. Not in screams, but in jeers and laughter.

Leo just stood there, dripping, shaking so hard I thought he might collapse. He wouldn’t look at anyone. He was trying to become invisible.

I knew that feeling.

My mom’s voice screamed in my head. We are ghosts, Mija! Look away!

My heart was a trapped bird in my chest. This was not my fight. This was a battle of gods, of teenage titans whose fathers moved markets. I was the help. I was the dirt under their shoes.

Chase took a step closer to Leo, puffing his chest. “What’s wrong, Vance? Gonna cry? Gonna call your daddy?”

Leo flinched.

Something inside me, the part that had been pushed down and polished into submission, finally broke.

I stood up.

The scrape of my chair was deafening in the sudden lull. Every eye in the cafeteria—including Chase’s and Leo’s—swiveled to me.

I was no longer invisible. I was a target.

My legs felt like cement as I walked the twenty feet across the floor. My hands were shaking, too. I kept them balled into fists.

I didn’t stop at Chase. I walked right past him, to Leo.

“Are you alright?” I asked. My voice was quiet, but it cut through the silence.

Leo looked at me. His eyes were wide, terrified, and utterly humiliated. He couldn’t speak.

I grabbed a fistful of napkins from a nearby table and started dabbing at his blazer. It was a stupid gesture. It was the gesture of a maid. I knew it even as I did it.

Chase let out a low, dangerous laugh. “Well, well. Look who it is.”

I froze.

“It’s the help,” he said, his voice dripping with condescension. “I didn’t know they let the maids eat in here. Are you going to clean that up for him, Maya?”

My name. He knew my name. My blood ran cold.

I stood up slowly and turned to face him. “Leave him alone, Chase.”

“What did you say?” His smile was gone.

“I said,” I repeated, my voice shaking now, but I held his gaze, “leave him alone.”

The entire cafeteria was holding its breath. A scholarship kid, the housekeeper’s daughter, was telling Chase Harding what to do. This was social suicide. This was, I realized with a sickening lurch, job suicide for my mom.

Chase’s face darkened. He took a step toward me. He was a foot taller than me, all muscle and rage. “You think because your mom wipes his daddy’s floors, you’re special? You’re nothing. You’re trash, just like…”

“Stop it.”

It wasn’t me. It was Leo.

His voice was a reedy whisper, but it was there. He was still shaking, milk dripping onto his shoes, but he had taken one small step. He was standing next to me.

It was all Chase needed. He saw this not as defiance, but as the ultimate weakness. He laughed, a real, ugly sound. “Oh, wow. Shaky has a bodyguard. And it’s the maid. This is perfect.”

He lifted his phone. “Say hi to the internet, you two.”

Before he could hit record, I did the only thing I could. I grabbed the half-empty soda bottle from his table and, in one fluid motion, dumped it over his phone.

The gasp was collective.

The soda, a sticky brown river, poured over his hand, onto his phone, and into his lap.

For a full five seconds, there was no sound at all. Just the drip, drip, drip of Coca-Cola on the floor.

Chase looked down at his soaked $2,000 jeans. He looked at his sputtering phone. Then he looked at me.

His expression wasn’t just angry. It was murderous.

“You,” he whispered. “You are so… dead.”

A teacher’s whistle blew from across the room. “Harding! Rodriguez! What is going on here?”

I didn’t wait. I grabbed Leo’s arm. “Come on.”

I dragged him out of the cafeteria, past the stunned faces, past the teachers rushing in. We didn’t stop running until we were in the deserted library, hidden behind the 19th-century history stacks.

We just stood there, panting.

“You… you…” Leo started, wiping his face.

“Are you okay?” I asked again.

He just stared at me. “No one… no one has ever done that.”

“Well,” I said, my adrenaline fading, replaced by a cold, hollowing dread. “Don’t get used to it.”

The rest of the day was a blur of whispered rumors. I was called to the principal’s office. Chase was there, his father’s lawyer already on speakerphone, threatening to sue me, the school, and probably the soda company. I said I tripped. Chase said I assaulted him. The school, terrified of two different billionaires, gave us both detention.

But the real punishment wasn’t detention.

It was the ride home.

Usually, I take the bus. But today, the black, gleaming town car that picks Leo up every day was waiting. The driver, a man I’d known my whole life, wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Mr. Vance requested you ride home with Leo,” he said, his voice flat.

It wasn’t a request. It was a summons.

The drive to the estate was twenty minutes of the loudest silence I have ever experienced. Leo sat on his side, I sat on mine. We were in the back of a $200,000 car, and I felt like I was in a hearse.

We drove through the massive iron gates, up the long, winding drive. The house loomed, cold and judgmental.

My mom was waiting.

She wasn’t on the main steps. She was outside our cottage, wringing her hands, her apron still on. She had that look—the one that meant trouble had come, the one that meant the ghosts had been seen.

Leo’s car didn’t stop. It continued to the main house.

“He wants to see you,” Leo whispered as the car pulled away, leaving me on the gravel path in front of my mom. “My dad. He’s… he’s home.”

My mom ran to me. “Mija! What did you do? Mrs. Harding called. She called Mr. Vance! She called him personally! Oh, Maria, what did you do?”

“I… I…” I couldn’t speak.

Before I could answer, a man in a suit I didn’t recognize stepped out of the main house. He wasn’t the driver. He was… someone else. Someone new.

“Ms. Rodriguez?” he said, his voice polite but cold as steel. “Mr. Vance will see you now. In his study.”

My mom let out a small, strangled sob and made the sign of the cross.

I was the help’s daughter. And I had been summoned.

Part 2

 

The walk from our cottage to the main house was the longest walk of my life. Every gravel crunch under my sneakers sounded like a judge’s gavel. My mom was trailing behind me, muttering prayers in Spanish. The man in the suit, who I now realized was Mr. Vance’s personal security, led the way.

We didn’t use the staff entrance.

He took me through the grand front doors, across the marble foyer so vast and silent it felt like a museum. My own reflection stared back at me from the polished floor—a terrified girl in a rumpled school uniform, a stain of Leo’s milk still on my sleeve.

The study. I’d only ever seen it from the hallway when I was helping my mom. It was the heart of the Vance empire.

The security man knocked once, a solid thud.

“Sir,” he said.

A deep voice from within. “Send her in. Her mother, too.”

My mom grabbed my hand. Her palm was rough and damp with fear.

The heavy oak door swung open.

The room was dark, paneled in wood so black it seemed to drink the light. The only illumination came from a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Chicago skyline, and a bank of monitors on Marcus Vance’s massive desk.

And there he was.

Marcus Vance. He wasn’t sitting. He was standing by the window, his back to us, a phone to his ear. He was in a perfectly tailored suit, and he radiated an energy so intense it felt like the air was vibrating.

“No, Jim,” he said into the phone, his voice a calm, lethal blade. “That’s not a negotiation. That’s a statement… Yes, you heard me. Consider the deal off.”

My stomach did a flip. Chase Harding’s father was Jim Harding.

Mr. Vance listened, his face impassive. “Your son’s behavior is a liability. It reflects… poorly… on your judgment. Clean it up.”

He hung up. He didn’t slam the phone down. He just placed it in its cradle with a deliberate, final click.

He turned.

His eyes. I’d seen him a thousand times, but I’d never been seen by him. His eyes were pale blue, and they didn’t just look at you; they X-rayed you.

“Mom, please…” I started, but my voice died.

My mother, Elena Rodriguez, a woman of incredible pride and strength, did the one thing I never thought I’d see. She practically fell to her knees.

“Mr. Vance, please, sir,” she cried, her voice thick. “She is a good girl. I don’t know what she did, but please, she is just a child. Don’t… please don’t fire me. I will pay for whatever she broke. I will…”

“Get up, Elena.”

His voice wasn’t kind, but it wasn’t cruel. It was just… absolute.

My mom scrambled to her feet, tears streaming down her face, wiping them on her apron.

“I…” I tried to speak. “Sir, it was my fault. All of it. Don’t blame my mom. I’ll pack my bags. I’ll leave.”

Marcus Vance just stared at me. He walked around his desk, and for a second, I thought he was going to yell. Instead, he tapped something on his keyboard.

“I’ve been having Leo followed.”

The statement hung in the air.

“What?” I whispered.

“I hired a private investigator three months ago,” Mr. Vance said, his voice flat. “I wanted to know why he was…failing. Why he was ‘shaky.’ I thought it was drugs. I thought…” He waved a hand, dismissing his own thoughts. “I thought he was weak.”

He turned one of the monitors toward us.

It was video.

My blood turned to ice. It was a recording… of the cafeteria. Not from a phone. It was clear, stable. From a distance. The audio was tinny, but you could hear everything.

Chase’s sneer. “Careful, Shaky.”

The laughter.

And then… me.

My own voice. “Leave him alone, Chase.”

We watched the entire, horrifying 90-second encounter. We watched me dump the soda. We watched Chase’s face turn to thunder.

The video ended.

Mr. Vance leaned against his desk. “The school called, of course. Jim Harding called, screaming. But I’d already seen this. I’ve been seeing things like this for weeks.”

He turned to my mom. “Elena. Your daughter,” he said, and my mom flinched, “is the first person… ever… to stand up for my son. Including himself. Including me.”

My mom and I just stared, uncomprehending. This wasn’t an_firing. What was this?

“I’ve been handling it all wrong,” he said, more to himself than to us. “I’ve been trying to ‘fix’ him. I’ve been trying to buy him a spine.” He looked at me, a long, calculating look. “Turns out, you can’t. But you can… hire it.”

“Sir?” I whispered.

“This P.I. costs me five thousand dollars a week,” Mr. Vance said. “He just sits and watches. He’s useless.”

He picked up a pen. “Maya Rodriguez. You’re a scholarship student. 4.0 GPA. Debate team. You’re invisible. Until today.”

“I… I’m sorry, sir,” I stammered.

“Don’t be,” he said, cutting me off. “You’ve just saved me a fortune in useless surveillance. And you’ve given me an idea.”

This was the moment. The floor was about to drop out from under us.

“Elena,” he said. “You’ve managed my household staff for twenty years. You run this place better than my own COO runs the office. I’m moving you. I’m creating a new position for you: Head of Properties and Household Management. You’ll oversee the staff at all my homes. Chicago, New York, the place in Aspen. The salary is triple what you make now.”

My mom’s jaw went slack. Her hands, which had been clutching her apron, simply fell to her sides. “Sir… I… I don’t understand.”

“It’s a promotion,” he said simply. “You’ve earned it. But it means you’ll be traveling. You won’t be here, in the cottage.”

My heart sank. It was a trick. He was separating us.

“Which brings me to Maya,” he continued, turning his gaze back to me.

I braced.

“I am pulling Leo out of Blackwood. Today. The school is a viper pit, and I’ve been letting him get bitten, thinking it would make him stronger. It hasn’t.”

He paused. “And I’m pulling you out, too.”

“No!” I said, louder than I intended. “Sir, please, my scholarship… I can’t… I’ll stay out of trouble. I’ll be a ghost. I promise. You won’t even know I’m there!”

“I know,” he said, and the barest hint of a smile touched his lips. “That’s the problem. You’re wasted there.”

He tapped his desk. “I’ve already spoken to the headmistress at the Alcott School. It’s… quieter. Better faculty. They specialize in ‘unique’ children. Leo will be starting there on Monday. And so will you.”

“I… I can’t afford the Alcott School,” I whispered. “It’s… it’s more than Blackwood.”

“I am not asking you to afford it,” Mr. Vance said. “I am paying for it. Your tuition, your books, your uniforms, your everything. From now until you graduate college. And graduate school, if you want it.”

My mom finally found her voice. “Sir, why? We… we are your staff.”

Marcus Vance looked at my mother. “Elena, for twenty years you’ve been loyal to my house. Today, your daughter was loyal to my son. It’s a different, and much more valuable, currency.”

He looked at me. “I don’t need a ghost, Maya. I need an example. Leo… he doesn’t listen to me. He’s terrified of me. He won’t be of you. You’re not his father. You’re not his “help.” You’re…”

“His friend?” I offered, my voice barely audible.

“His ally,” Mr. Vance corrected. “I don’t need you to be his bodyguard. I just need you… to not be invisible. I need him to see what one person with a spine can do.”

He was offering me a golden cage. A new, more expensive school, but with the same job: watch Leo.

“I have one condition,” I said.

My mom gasped. “Mija!”

Marcus Vance just raised an eyebrow. He was a man who lived for negotiation. I had his attention.

“My mom,” I said, my voice shaking but firm. “She takes the job. But I don’t go to Alcott.”

“Maya, no!” my mom pleaded. “This is your future!”

“Let her speak,” Mr. Vance said.

“I stay at Blackwood,” I said, my heart hammering. “You don’t pull me out. You don’t pull Leo out.”

“You want to go back there?” he asked, incredulous. “After today? Harding will make your life a living hell.”

“Let him try,” I said. “You pull Leo out now, you’re teaching him to run. You do that, and Chase Harding wins. You pull me out, you’re teaching him that I had to be ‘saved,’ just like him. We don’t run. We stay. And you,” I looked him dead in the eye, “you call Jim Harding back, and you tell him the deal is back on. On one condition: his son never, ever lays a hand on Leo again.”

I was playing with fire. A billionaire’s fire.

Marcus Vance stared at me. The silence in the room was so total, I could hear the ticking of the antique clock on the mantel.

He was analyzing me, calculating, running the numbers.

Then, he did something I never could have predicted.

He laughed.

It wasn’t a happy laugh. It was a bark of pure, surprised respect.

“You’re not the help’s daughter,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re a CEO. You’re a damn shark, Maya Rodriguez.”

He walked back to his desk and picked up the phone.

“Get me Jim Harding back,” he said into the receiver.

He looked at me, a new, sharp glint in his eye. “You win. You both stay. Your mom gets her promotion. You… you get my full, undivided backing. From now on, at that school, you’re not the help’s daughter. You’re a Vance.”

“No,” I said, feeling a sudden, dizzying rush of power. “I’m not. I’m Maya Rodriguez. And he,” I nodded toward the door, where I knew Leo was probably listening, “is Leo Vance. And we’re not running.”

Mr. Vance’s call connected. “Jim. Good. You’re still there. I’ve reconsidered… Yes. But I have a new addendum to the contract. It concerns our children…”

My mom was crying again, but this time, they weren’t tears of fear.

I stood there, in the billionaire’s study, my uniform stained with milk, my hands still shaking.

But for the first time in my life, I wasn’t invisible. I wasn’t a ghost.

And I knew, with absolute certainty, that the next day at school, things were going to be very, very different.