I arrived eighteen minutes late to my interview at a billion-dollar company — blouse torn, soaked in mud, my hands stained with dried blood.

“Is she homeless? The interview’s closed. We have a strict dress code,” the receptionist sneered, and the whole lobby laughed.

But when the arrogant VP saw me later, he fell to his knees and wept.

Chapter 1 — The Lobby

Everyone in the pristine, temperature-controlled lobby turned when I walked in. I wasn’t just covered in mud. I looked like a casualty of war.

Heavy sludge was caked into the wool of my blazer, smeared across my cheek, and tangled in the right side of my hair.

A dark brown streak slashed across my white blouse, running into a jagged, missing section of fabric near the hem.

Rust-colored stains marked my hands — dried blood.

It was a testament to the fact that I’d just crawled out of a flash-flood drainage culvert with nothing but sheer, desperate stubbornness holding my spine straight.

The receptionist at the Pierce Meridian Group lowered her porcelain coffee cup, her manicured nails tapping the saucer.

Two men in tailored Italian suits stopped their conversation about third-quarter margins. A woman near the brushed-steel elevators leaned toward her colleague and whispered, “Is she homeless?”

I heard it. I pretended I hadn’t.

That was a skill I’d perfected in the desert, surrounded by men who thought a female logistics officer couldn’t handle the heat of Kandahar.