Josie is twenty-three and very good at her job. Her job is being wanted by strangers, an hour at a time, for money that was never really hers, under a name that was never really hers, in a life she watches from somewhere near the ceiling.
Then a man buys an evening with her as a joke for his shy best friend. The friend opens the door in a shirt with the fold-creases still in it and asks whether Candy is short for Candace. He does not touch her. He feeds her.
It costs him everything he has, and he never once puts any of it on her bill. She has been counting it ever since.
Pre-Paid is about what happens to a person who has been priced by everyone and treasured by no one when somebody finally pays attention instead of money. It is about shame, and what actually gets a stain out.
Twenty years later, from a house with two teenagers asleep down the hall, she tells you what happened. She starts with the worst of it, because she has been misjudged before and would rather you knew who was talking.
It is explicit in places and does not apologize for it. It also contains a farm woman with a dish towel over her shoulder who fixes nothing and changes everything.
The book has opened
Read the first three chapters. All of it. Free.
The first three chapters are on the reader now, cover to closing line, the way they will read in the book. Thirty-four chapters in the complete novel. Start where Josie starts.
Be there when the lights come on
Leave your email and you'll hear from me when Pre-Paid is out. Nothing else, no noise.