When they saw me leaning against my car, my dad stopped. The rage was there, trying to ignite, but it was dampened by fear.
“You,” he croaked. “You did this.”
“I did,” I said calmly.
“You ruined us!” my mother hissed, stepping forward, her hand raising instinctively to strike.
I didn’t flinch. I just held up my phone. On the screen was a photo I had taken the night of the assault—my bloodied mouth, the broken tooth, the fear in my eyes.
“Touch me again,” I said, my voice low and dangerous, “and this photo goes to the police, along with the rest of the file that Mr. Keller didn’t get. The part about the grandmother’s loans.”
She froze. Her hand hovered in the air, then dropped to her side.
“You’re ungrateful,” she spat, tears streaming down her face. “After everything we gave you. We’re family.”
“No,” I said. “You’re parasites.”
The word hung in the cool night air. I savored it. I tasted the irony of it, sweet and heavy.
“And parasites,” I continued, quoting her own words back to her, “should learn to obey.”
My father looked at the ground. He was shaking. “We have nothing,” he whispered. “The house… the reputation… it’s all gone.”
“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.
