“You have each other,” I said, opening my car door. “That’s what matters, right?”
I got in the car and started the engine. As I pulled away, I looked in the rearview mirror. They were standing under the streetlamp, illuminated in a harsh, unforgiving yellow light. They looked like ghosts.
I drove to a 24-hour diner where Trent was waiting. He had a milkshake and a laptop open. When I walked in, he looked up and grinned.
“Did it work?” he asked.
I sat down, running my tongue over the gap in my teeth. It would cost a few thousand to fix. An implant. A crown. It would be painful, and it would take time.
But the Meridian System had just been valued by a preliminary investor at three hundred thousand dollars. The rights were exclusively mine.
“Yeah,” I said, picking up the menu. “It worked.”
I looked at my reflection in the diner window. The girl looking back wasn’t the scared daughter who hid in her room. She was someone new. Someone who had learned that sometimes, you have to break a part of yourself to escape a trap.
