Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The Money That Came From Pain
The money that changed Noa Maro’s life came from the day somebody almost broke it.
It arrived on a Tuesday morning.
No angels sang. No mysterious wind rattled the windows. Her tarot cards stayed exactly where she’d left them.
Her phone buzzed while she was brushing her teeth.
Noa ignored it.
It buzzed again.
She spat toothpaste into the sink and picked up the phone, expecting another email she didn’t care about.
Instead, she stared at a number.
A large number.
For several seconds, her brain refused to understand what she was seeing.
Then it did.
The settlement.
“Well, damn.”
She sat on the closed toilet lid.
Years earlier, she’d been sitting in the back seat of a rideshare when another car turned an ordinary day into doctors, lawyers, appointments, paperwork, and a back that occasionally reminded her that bodies kept receipts.
The injury wasn’t catastrophic.
She could walk. She could work. She could live.
Her pain was quieter than catastrophe.
An ache after standing too long. A position she stopped sleeping in. A stiffness she learned to stretch around.
A small permanent before-and-after.
The case moved slowly.
Life did not.
By the time the money arrived, Noa was no longer the woman who had been sitting in the back of that car.
She had lost people.
Left people.
Been left by people.
Worked jobs that paid her without knowing her.
Stayed too long in places and relationships after something inside them had already gone dark.
The settlement was supposed to make something right.
It couldn’t.
Money could pay for what pain cost. It could not go backward and prevent the pain.
Still, Noa stared at the balance.
Then opened a flight-search app.
She didn’t book anything that morning.
That would have been reckless.
Noa preferred to think of herself as impulsive only after extensive research.
There was a difference.
She made coffee, opened her laptop, and started a spreadsheet.
Savings.
Debt.
Rent.
Emergency fund.
Possible apartments.
The sensible future arranged itself neatly across cells.
A place of her own.
Furniture.
Stable job.
Predictable expenses.
Maybe a car eventually.
A life that stayed put.
The kind of life people congratulated you for wanting.
Noa stared at the spreadsheet.
Then minimized it.
She searched:
Flights to Thailand.
She laughed.
“Absolutely not.”
She closed the tab.
Twenty minutes later, she opened it again.
Maybe the problem was that Noa had learned too young that there was no such thing as a perfectly safe plan.
People died anyway.
Her father taught her that first.
Papi.
Leonel Soria had been funny in a way Noa remembered more through feeling than through individual jokes. She remembered being excited to go to his house. She remembered his cologne. She remembered looking at him with the uncomplicated awe children reserved for adults they believed could do anything.
Papi was Superman.
Until he wasn’t.
He died when Noa was young.
AIDS.
There had been a time when she hated saying that word.
Not because she loved him less, but because people could take one word and make it larger than the entire human being who had lived before it.
So for years she simply said her father died.
Eventually she stopped carrying other people’s stigma for them.
Her father died of AIDS.
And he was still Papi.
The disease didn’t erase his laugh.
It didn’t erase his cologne.
It didn’t erase the little girl who loved going to his house.
For a while after his death, some stubborn part of Noa imagined he might come back.
Children were allowed to misunderstand permanence.
She imagined a mistake. A misunderstanding. A door opening.
Then days became months.
Reality stayed.
As an adult, something else about his death began hurting.
Noa realized how little she had actually known about him.
Children didn’t interview their parents.
She hadn’t asked who he was before she existed. What Cuba had meant to him. Who his people were. Who had loved him before she did. Who had broken his heart. What he regretted.
She didn’t know enough about that entire side of herself.
Sometimes she wanted something embarrassingly simple.
One person.
Just one.
Someone who could look at her and say:
I knew your father.
Not knew of him.
Knew him.
Someone who could tell her a story she’d never heard.
Proof that Papi existed somewhere outside her memories.
After Papi, there was Sim.
Simeon.
Granddad Sim.
The man who raised her.
If Papi had been Superman, Sim was something less glamorous and far more necessary.
He was there.
He was support. Protection. Familiarity. The ordinary things children rarely understand are extraordinary until they’re gone.
Then Noa lost him too.
Papi’s death taught her that people could disappear.
Sim’s taught her that safety could disappear with them.
Afterward, family became harder to understand.
Noa sometimes felt surrounded by people who loved her and still somehow overlooked her.
It took years to understand that being loved and being understood were not the same thing.
Her grandmother Daisie was part of that contradiction.
Daisie could be hard on her.
She could also sit with her Bible for hours, reading, underlining passages, and praying about virtually everything.
Bad news?
Pray.
Family trouble?
Pray.
Don’t know what to do?
Pray about that too.
Daisie also had dreams.
The strange kind.
She’d wake knowing something was wrong with someone. Sometimes she’d dream about people shortly before hearing from them. She never called herself psychic.
They were simply her dreams.
And whatever they meant, she took them to God.
Noa grew up around that without thinking it unusual.
Daisie also loved yellow flowers.
Years after losing her, Noa still smiled whenever she saw them.
Some associations survived people.
Maybe that was why Noa never completely dismissed the strange things that happened to her.
The night Papi died, she had been jolted awake, drenched in cold sweat.
It had never happened before.
Later she learned he’d died during that same stretch of night.
Was it him?
Noa didn’t know.
She had learned to leave some questions unanswered.
Years later, when Daisie died, Noa experienced something stranger.
She felt a light touch at the corner of her back.
Daisie had been shorter than her and used to touch her that exact way when squeezing past.
A little touch.
Excuse me, baby.
Noa turned.
Nobody was there.
Grief could do strange things.
So could memory.
Maybe something else could too.
She never decided.
That was the thing about Noa.
She didn’t need everything mysterious to become supernatural.
But she didn’t need everything supernatural explained away either.
Tarot came later.
During long night shifts when most of the world was asleep.
She’d listened to readings before, but eventually curiosity became participation.
She bought a deck.
Then started learning.
Then reading.
Eventually she filmed herself and put readings online.
Sometimes people told her she’d described situations she couldn’t possibly know about.
Noa never announced that she had some grand spiritual gift.
She simply kept reading.
The cards gave language to things she sometimes felt before she could explain them.
That was enough.
The settlement money remained untouched for three days.
On the fourth, Noa booked Thailand.
One-way.
She stared at the confirmation page.
There it was.
Her name.
Her flight.
A completely unnecessary decision that suddenly felt more necessary than anything she’d done in years.
Then the sensible part of her brain started screaming.
Where will you live afterward?
What about work?
What if you hate it?
What if something happens?
Noa closed the laptop.
Something had already happened.
Many things had.
That was the point.
She had spent years behaving as though enough caution could guarantee another tomorrow.
It couldn’t.
Papi died.
Sim died.
Daisie died.
Relationships ended.
Jobs disappeared.
Bodies got hurt while sitting innocently in the back seat of cars.
Time did not sign contracts.
Noa wanted memories.
She wanted to stand somewhere she’d never stood.
Eat something she couldn’t pronounce.
Wake up and have absolutely no idea what the day would bring.
She was tired of normal.
Normal had never protected her anyway.
The night before her flight, Noa’s suitcase sat open on the floor.
Her tarot deck sat beside it.
She had already decided not to bring it.
Then decided she should.
Then decided carrying seventy-eight pieces of cardboard across an ocean because she felt weird leaving them behind was ridiculous.
She picked up the deck.
“One card.”
She shuffled.
A card slipped free and landed face-down on the bed.
Noa turned it over.
The Fool.
She stared at it.
Then laughed.
“Of course.”
The traveler.
The beginning.
A figure standing at the edge of the known world carrying almost nothing.
Noa looked from the card to her suitcase.
“Very subtle.”
She put The Fool back into the deck and packed the cards.
As she zipped the suitcase, something yellow caught her eye.
A tiny flower lay near the bedroom door.
Noa frowned.
She hadn’t bought flowers.
There weren’t any plants in the room.
She picked it up.
Probably tracked inside on a shoe.
Probably caught on her clothes.
Probably nothing.
Still, Noa smiled.
“Okay, Grandma.”
She placed the flower on the nightstand and turned off the light.
She didn’t know what waited on the other side of that plane ticket.
She didn’t know that travel would eventually give her something to love that seemed, somehow, to love her back.
She didn’t know that years later she’d arrive in a city she’d never visited and hear a stranger speak Papi’s name.
For now, she knew only one thing.
Noa Maro was tired of waiting for life to choose her.
So she chose something first.
