Her mom winced as she plucked the ad from Ruby’s hand. “I didn’t know how awful the company was at the time. I didn’t know much of anything, to be honest. I was twenty six and had just divorced Stepfather Un. Remember? He took everything with him when he left—all the furniture, all the food. He even pulled every last light bulb from its socket. I would have put you in a commercial for anything at that point.”

Ruby felt a pang as she watched her mother smooth the magazine page and fold it back up, something like reverence in her movements.

“I do remember,” Ruby said softly. “You told me we were going to camp inside the apartment for a few weeks—we slept on blankets in the living room and hung a string of Christmas lights from the ceiling so we could pretend they were stars. I thought it was the best thing ever.”

“We lived on that racist cereal for three weeks,” her mother added thoughtfully. “I lost almost eight pounds. It was the best thing that could have happened, now that I think about it.”

“Mom, you don’t mean that.”

Her mom laughed. “Of course I do. That was when I met Stepfather Deux. I’d never looked so good.”

Ruby waited, exasperated, for her mother to expand on the theme. Although there was no denying that Stepfather Deux had changed both their lives for the better, her mother had to see how outrageous it had been—selling her daughter’s face to a soulless company, barely surviving in an apartment that had only been paid through the month, a secondhand harp the only item of value they owned.

She didn’t.

With a sigh, Ruby turned her attention back to the filing cabinet, her fingers rifling through until she found what she was looking for. Extracting the single sheet, she gave voice to the question that had been taking shape in her mind ever since she’d met Spencer Wilson. “Didn’t you ever want more out of life?”

“More?” Her mother blinked. “Of what? Money? Of course I did. What do you think all that work was for?”

Ruby shook her head. She wasn’t talking about landing a modeling contract or being discovered by a talent agency. She also wasn’t talking about the kind of work she and her mom had always fallen back on—the waitressing and the caregiving, the jobs that never seemed to turn into careers no matter how many years they spent doing them.

“What is that?” Her mom nodded down at the page in her hand. “It doesn’t look like much.”