She opened the flap and scanned the front page. Her eyebrows lifted. The document bore the embossed seal of Winton Industries Legal Office, printed across the top in crisp navy lettering. At the bottom was an electronic signature belonging to someone important.
“This is not garbage,” Brenna murmured.
Mitchell looked genuinely surprised. “Is it serious?”
“I think it might be very serious,” Brenna replied. She glanced at Jace. “Where did you find this?”
“Behind the building,” he said. “Near the dumpsters. A bag was torn. I saw the logo. My mom used to say if something has someone else’s name on it, you should try to give it back.”
Brenna’s heart tightened at the honesty in his words. She pressed a phone button on her desk.
“Mr. Winton’s office? There is something he needs to see. Immediately.”
Before arriving in the lobby, Jace had already lived a lifetime’s worth of struggle.
He had grown up on the east side of Riverview, Illinois, in a neighborhood where windows were patched with cardboard and children learned to step over broken glass before they learned to cross the street. His mother, Maribel, had scrubbed hospital floors at night and came home smelling of bleach and exhaustion, yet she always managed to hum lullabies while heating canned soup. She told him stories about having dreams, even if life seemed bent on stealing them.
When Maribel passed away suddenly, gone like a light switched off in the middle of a sentence, Jace was left alone with a grandmother who was too weak to care for herself. The system tried to place him, but Jace slipped through fingers like spilled water. He began collecting cans, sleeping in abandoned cars or under tarps when it rained, wandering the city like a ghost no one saw.
Yet one lesson from his mother clung to him like a heartbeat: right and wrong mattered, no matter who you were.
That was why, when he dug through a dumpster for recyclables and found the pristine envelope, he froze. The company’s logo gleamed even through grime: Winton Industries, owned by a man who smiled from billboards and magazines. A man who promised to create jobs and opportunities while shaking hands with governors.
Jace could have left it. He could have sold it for scrap value. Instead, he tucked it under his shirt to protect it from the rain and walked all the way to Lakeshore Plaza, rehearsing his explanation with every step until the words felt threadbare.