Chapter 11: The Fund

I walked into the Fenwick Street kitchen at seven in the morning carrying a loaf of rye bread.

Hana had put it in my hands at her door.

"For your sisters," she'd said. "I'm not a monster."

Seven women looked up from the table at the same moment.

They looked at the bread.

They looked at my glasses, which were still crooked.

"Don't," I said.

"I didn't say anything," said Mic.

"Your face did."

"My face is allowed to have a headline."

Bird took the loaf without a word and began slicing it, with a huge grin she was trying to hide.

Nobody else was smiling.

Judge sat at the end of the table with a stack of paper and a yellow highlighter.

Vivian stood behind her with her arms folded.

"Sit," said Vivian.

I sat in my old chair.

"I wanted to tell you in person," Judge said. "I've been reading the Alumni Fund's tax filings."

"Those are public?"

"Every charity files one every year. Mrs. Price's Fund has filed eleven of them. I pulled all of them last night."

She slid the top page toward me.

It was a gray form, dense with boxes, with a column of numbers I'd have thought were a bus schedule.

"Here is every dollar the Fund took in from every donor over your eleven years," she said.

"Six hundred ninety thousand dollars."

"And mine was four hundred twelve."

"Yours was the bulk of it. Your name is on the donor schedule every year, in the same line."

"This line," Judge said, and she touched her highlighter to a number, "is every scholarship that went to a girl from the Row."

I read it.

One hundred thirty-eight thousand dollars.

The kitchen was quiet.

"That's a third of mine," I said slowly.

"That's a fifth of everything they took in," said Judge.

"Where's the rest?"

She turned the page.

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