I Said 1400 a Month While He Held Up His Phone and Stared at Me ...

I didn't see Marta until the microwave dinged behind me. It was past nine and the main kitchen had gone quiet, the under-cabinet lights still spilling warm over the white marble. I had my plate of rice and beans balanced in one hand and my fork in the other, my cap still pinned on because I hadn't had time to take it off.

Marta slipped into the staff break corner off the kitchen with her dinner and sat across from me at the little laminate table. She was older than me by maybe fifteen years, her dark hair pulled back under a black headband, her gray uniform same as mine but with the cuffs rolled up.

"You eat fast," she said, nodding at my plate.

I shrugged. "I didn't eat lunch. I was on the second floor all day."

She didn't answer right away. She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a plain white cash envelope, creased at the corners. She set it on the table between our plates and tapped it once with her finger.

"Counted it in the laundry room," she said.

I looked down. Inside were five folded twenties and a stack of tens, thin. No pay slip. No hours printed. Just cash.

"How short?" I asked.

"Three hundred," she said. "Supposed to be eleven. Got eight."

The microwave fan clicked off. The corner felt smaller, the hum of the big refrigerator filling the quiet. I pushed my rice around with my fork and my hand didn't feel steady.

"No slip again?" I said.

"No slip since June. BrightNest said direct deposit was having problems. Then it was cash until the system fixed. System never fixed."

She folded the envelope closed and slid it back into her pocket like she didn't want the cameras to linger on it. My chest tightened.

"Did you call them?" I asked.

Marta glanced toward the dark hallway, then back at me. "I didn't. Elena did. Before you."

I didn't know that name. "Elena?"

"She worked here last spring. Live-in, like you. She kept her hours on her phone. When her envelope came light two months in a row, she called the office." Marta's voice dropped. "They said she must have miscounted. Said if she didn't trust them, they had ten girls waiting for this house. Next week her schedule went to two days. Week after, she was gone."

I stopped chewing. The beans tasted suddenly too salty. I set my fork down against the white plate.

"She asked and they fired her," I said.

"They didn't fire her," Marta said. "They just stopped sending her. That's how they do it."

For a minute neither of us ate. I could hear the ice maker drop in the freezer. I thought about my own envelope in my locker upstairs, the 1400 I'd told Mr. Reyes about in cash with no breakdown. I thought about the plain rice I'd eaten on the floor that first night because I'd been too embarrassed to take chicken from the staff tray when my hours had already been cut back.

"It connects," I said quietly. "The short hours. The short food. I'm not imagining it."

Marta studied me. "What did you tell him?"

I hesitated. Daniel's face was still in my head from the night before, serious at the laptop screen, asking me to forward the portal. "I told him what I get. I didn't give him anything to take to them."

"Good," she said fast. "Don't. Not yet. Once your name is on a complaint, you're Elena."

I nodded, but my stomach turned. Keeping quiet felt safer and also felt like lying. Marta must have seen it because she reached across and moved my plate a half inch closer to me, like she wanted me to keep eating.

"We log it ourselves," she said. "Just us. Dates, start, end. No phone. Paper they can't pull from the cloud."

From her other pocket she pulled a folded grocery receipt and a short pencil stub. She smoothed the receipt blank-side up on the table. The back was white with faint blue ink bleeding through.

"You write first," she said.

My hand shook a little as I wrote. Oct 3 - 6:45a to 9:20p. Oct 4 - 6:30a to 9:40p. Marta added hers below in tight block letters. Two lines each, with hours we both knew wouldn't match what BrightNest billed.

When we finished, Marta refolded the receipt around the pencil and tucked it inside an empty tea box on the shelf above the microwave, behind the decaf no one drank.

"Only you and me know," she said.