“Is he sleeping?” Emma whispered.
Lily slowly shook her head.
Their mother had taught them the difference.
Sleeping people breathed normally.
Sleeping people moved when touched.
Sleeping people didn’t turn gray around the mouth.
Then Lily dropped to her knees beside the billionaire.
“Mister?” she whispered softly. “Can you hear me?”
PART 2
Ethan could hear her from very far away, as though she stood on the other side of a wall. He tried to answer, but his mouth would not form words.
Emma knelt beside her sister.
“He’s cold.”
“Get Mom’s phone,” Lily said.
“It only works sometimes.”
“Try.”
Emma pulled the cracked phone from the backpack. It had belonged to their mother, and the screen was spiderwebbed from the night everything went wrong. Emma pressed the power button once. Nothing. She pressed it again and whispered, “Please.”
The screen lit.
Her hands trembled as she dialed 911.
“Emergency services. What is your emergency?”
Emma swallowed. Her voice was small, but it did not break.
“A man fell in Linden Park. He’s not waking up. He’s breathing funny. Please come fast.”
The dispatcher asked questions. Emma answered as best she could. Lily stayed beside Ethan and took his hand in both of hers.
It was a strange thing, that hand.
His was large, cold, and heavy.
Hers was tiny, warm, and sticky from the piece of bread she had eaten for breakfast.
She pressed his hand against her chest because she had once seen a nurse do something like that with her mother.
“Don’t go,” Lily whispered. “You have to wait. The ambulance is coming.”
Ethan heard those words.
He could not respond, but he heard them.
Don’t go.
For years, people had told him to hurry, decide, sign, sell, cut, acquire, win.
No one had told him to stay.
Sirens rose in the distance…
PART 3
The ambulance arrived less than six minutes later, but by then the crowd around us had doubled.
Not to help.
To stare.
Some people pointed their phones at me and Emma while strangers whispered words like “pickpockets” and “scammers.” One woman even grabbed Emma’s wrist and shouted that she saw me reaching into the man’s jacket.
I tried explaining that I was searching for his phone because the dispatcher told us emergency contacts could help save him faster. But nobody listened to little girls who looked homeless. To them, poor children were guilty before they even spoke.
When the paramedics finally pushed through the crowd, one of them immediately knelt beside the man.
Then his entire expression changed.
“Oh my God,” he muttered. “That’s Ethan Caldwell.”
Suddenly everyone cared.
The same people who walked around him minutes earlier now pretended they had been worried the entire time. Cameras flashed everywhere. Someone said the billionaire was probably dead. Another person claimed we caused it somehow.
Emma started crying beside me.
I held her hand tighter and whispered the same thing our mother used to tell us:
“Stay quiet when people want someone to blame.”
