Page 1 of Billionaire Corruption
Chapter 1
Grace
I never told anyone about that afternoon.
Not because I didn’t want to.
I didn’t talk about it because I didn’t know what to say. How could I begin to find the words to talk about the few minutes that were both the most frightening and the most exciting moments of my life?
It had been so brief, our encounter in the elevator.
I never even got his name.
But I could not forget it.
I had gone to drop off a job application at a financial firm. I had just graduated college and was looking for a job, an exhausting process. It was late afternoon when I got into the elevator, pushed the button for the ground floor and didn’t look up. The elevator started going down but then, suddenly, stopped. The lights flickered on and off, which was unusual.
I looked at the man standing next to me, and he turned to face me, confusion on his face too.
“What the…”
The next moment, the lights went off again and stayed off.
The elevator fell.
It was horrifying, absolutely terrible. I remember thinking that I was going to die. Strange thoughts went through my head, like the fact that I had never called my mom back, thatI wanted to make spaghetti for dinner that night. I worried about my brother and my father, which was odd because I didn’t often think about them. There were things I still wanted to do; I wasn’t done yet.
Then, abruptly, the lift stopped.
The lights came on.
I was sitting on the ground, having been thrown down when the elevator dropped. I was aware of my head hurting slightly where I had knocked it against the side of the elevator. The man was sitting right next to me, legs stretched out in front of him.
“Are you… all right?” he asked me.
I nodded.
“I think I’m fine too,” he said, sounding dazed.
Both of us were in shock.
“I thought, that was it,” he said, giving a sort of laugh, a sound of surprise. “End of the road.”
“I know. Me too,” I said, finding my voice.
I noticed then that we were holding hands, I had no recollection of grabbing his hand or him taking mine. But our fingers were interlaced, our palms melded firmly together. He did not try to take his hand away and neither did I. We looked at each other and then, just like that, we were kissing as if we weren’t strangers in an elevator, but as if we’d known each other for years, forever. It was a surreal moment of passion, and when the elevator gave a sudden shake, we drew apart, as if we were coming up for air.
The doors opened and arms were reaching in to help us out. We were stuck some distance from the next floor, and he helped lift me up so that I could reach the arms of our rescuers. I was covered in blankets, carried to chairs where a paramedic had a look at me. By the time I thought to look around for him, my elevator companion had already left.
My legs were shaking but I didn’t know if it was because of the shock of the fall or the kiss. I kept hearing how lucky we’d been. How if the lift had kept going on a few more floors, it would’ve crashed into the ground. Game over.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss.
I tried to remember details about the man in the elevator, if he’d told me anything about his job or if I’d seen a company name or anything that could give me an idea who he was. But there was nothing.
He had vanished from my life as suddenly as he’d entered it. Yet, I couldn’t forget him or the few moments in the elevator.
But I went on with my life, looking for work, finally finding a junior job at an accounting firm, which paid next to nothing. Going home to my grandmother and teenaged brother, waiting for my father to text me from the oil rig where he was working.
