Ivy's hands were shaking as she grabbed the phone from the hospital. The doctor's voice was calm, but his words felt like blows.
"Your mother's medicine is running out. If she doesn't get the new treatment by tomorrow, her situation will get worse."
Ivy closed her eyes. She was already working two jobs. She was already giving everything. And it still wasn't enough.
"How much?" she asked, even though she already knew she wouldn't have the money.
"Eight hundred dollars. And that's just for this month."
She hung up and stared at her paycheck sitting on the counter—three hundred and twenty dollars for five days of work. Her stomach twisted. She had rent to pay. She had food to buy. She had a thousand other things asking money she didn't have.
Ivy grabbed her jacket and ran to The Velvet bar. She was already fifteen minutes late.
The bar was her second job. It was dark, sticky, and smelled like spilled beer and sorrow. But it paid slightly better than her morning shift at the coffee shop. Slightly. She pushed through the back door, trying to ignore the heat in her feet and the heaviness in her chest.
"You're late again," Marcus said, not looking up from the register. He was the manager—a man who treated everyone like they were mistakes.
"I'm sorry. I'll make up the time," Ivy said, quickly tying her apron.
Marcus finally looked at her. "Make up the time? Girl, you don't get paid by the hour here. You get paid by the drinks you pour. And if you're late, that's fewer drinks, fewer tips, fewer bucks in your pocket."
He didn't say it to be mean. He just said it like it was a fact, like he was helping her understand how the world worked. But it felt mean anyway.
Ivy nodded and moved to the bar. The place was already filling up. Friday night meant money—but it also meant drunk people, rude people, and people who saw her as just a pair of hands, not as a person.
A group of five rich-looking guys came in, laughing too loud. One of them had a gold watch that probably cost more than Ivy's flat. Another was complaining about his business deal falling through. "I only made two million this quarter," he said, like it was a tragedy. "TWO MILLION."
Ivy poured their drinks and stayed unseen.
That was her talent. She could be in a room full of people and nobody would really see her. She moved like a ghost—there, but not there. Present, but not present. It made the work easier in some ways. Nobody worried the invisible girl. Nobody expected anything from her.
But sometimes, late at night when she was alone in her tiny apartment with her mother sleeping in the next room, Ivy wondered what it would feel like to be seen.
The night dragged on. A bachelorette party came in, already drunk, getting louder with each shot. An old man sat alone at the end of the bar, sipping the same drink for three hours. A couple fought in the corner booth, their words getting sharper and meaner until they finally left without paying.
By midnight, Ivy's feet were screaming. Her back hurt. Her tips were terrible—mostly change, a few dollar bills. She was maybe forty dollars richer than when she started, and that was only if she counted the coins.
She was wiping down the bar when her phone buzzed. It was a text from her neighbor, Mrs. Wong.
"Your mom is asking for you. She says she's in pain. I gave her water."
Ivy's heart jumped. Her mother had been doing better the last few days. Pain meant something was wrong. Her fingers moved fast as she texted back: "I'll be home after work. Tell her I love her."
She shoved the phone back in her pocket and tried to focus. But the fear was eating her from the inside out. She could feel it like a cancer, spreading through her veins, making it hard to breathe.
Two more hours, she told herself. Just two more hours. Then she could go home.
The bar was finally clearing out around 2 AM. Most of the drunks had stumbled away. Marcus was counting the register in the back. Ivy was alone at the bar, cleaning cups that would just get dirty again tomorrow.
That's when the door opened.
She didn't look up at first. Just kept cleaning, kept being unseen. But something made her lift her eyes.
A man walked in. Even in the dim light of the bar, she could see he was different from the normal crowd. He wore an expensive suit, but it was messy like he'd been pulling at it. His dark hair was falling in his eyes. He looked... broken. Like someone had tried to smash him and he was barely holding the pieces together.
He was alone, which was strange for someone who looked like him. Rich men usually went in packs, surrounded by other rich men congratulating each other on how rich they were.
This man looked lost.
He sat at the bar right across from where Ivy was standing. He didn't look at her at first. He just stared at his own hands like they belonged to someone else.
"What do you want?" Ivy asked, using her automatic bar voice—polite, detached, invisible.
The man finally looked up. His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and they were filled with something that made Ivy's chest hurt. Pain. Real pain. Not the rich-guy-problems pain. Real pain.
"I don't know," he said quietly. "I don't know what I want anymore."
Ivy didn't know why she did it. She usually didn't talk to people. She just took orders and moved on. But something about this man made her stop.
"Bad day?" she asked.
The man let out a laugh that sounded more like a cry. "Bad decade. Bad life. Bad... everything."
He ordered a drink. She made it. He drank it. Then he ordered another. She made that one too. And as the hours passed, something strange happened.
He started talking.
He told her about a business deal gone bad. He told her about betrayal. He told her about feeling alone even though he had everything. He told her about his childhood, about his father leaving, about building a kingdom that felt empty.
And Ivy listened.
She didn't judge. She didn't try to fix it. She just listened like he mattered. Like his pain was real and important and worth hearing.
For hours, until the sun started coming up, they talked. And for the first time in her life, Ivy wasn't invisible. She was seen.
But as the sun painted the sky pink and orange, something happened that changed everything.
A phone on the bar—the man's phone—buzzed loudly. He looked at it, and his whole face went cold. He read something on the screen, and his expression changed into something Ivy had never seen before.
Terror.
"What's wrong?" Ivy asked.
The man slowly looked up at her. His voice was barely a whisper.
"My company's money is gone. Millions of dollars. Missing. And they're blaming my best friend. But that's not what's scary." He paused, and his eyes locked onto hers with an intensity that made her blood freeze. "I just got a message from my lawyer. They found something else. Something that shows my best friend couldn't have done it alone. Someone on the inside helped him. Someone I trust completely. And if I'm right about who it is..."
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.
Because at that exact moment, the door to The Velvet burst open, and three guys in expensive suits stormed in. They looked like lawyers. Or cops. Or both.
They walked straight toward the man at the bar and one of them said the words that made everything freeze: "Adrian Kessler? We need to talk about the thirty million dollars missing from your business. And we need to talk about it now."
Ivy's eyes went wide.
Adrian. The man she'd just spent all night talking to. The man she'd been seeing as just another lonely person. Was named Adrian Kessler.
And he was someone important enough that men in suits came looking for him in a dive bar at dawn.
But that wasn't the worst part.
The worst part was that Adrian looked at her—really looked at her for the last time that morning—and his face said everything.
He couldn't let these guys know she existed. He couldn't let them know he'd been here. He couldn't let her be connected to him in any way.
And as the guys escorted him out of The Velvet, Adrian gave her one final look.
A look that said: Forget me.
But Ivy knew, standing alone in that empty bar as the sun rose, that forgetting him would be impossible.
Because something about last night had changed her.
And she didn't even know his name was Adrian Kessler.
Not yet.