Abigail slapped both cheeks lightly, trying to force some color into her skin, and opened the door.

She moved slowly down the hallway, sneakers silent on the thick carpet. As she passed the master bedroom, a sliver of warm pink light spilled from a door left slightly ajar.

She should have kept walking. She didn't.

She pushed the door open just an inch.

It was a princess room. The walls were covered in framed photographs of a beautiful blonde girl at every age — birthday candles, ski slopes, ballet recitals, beach vacations. A pristine white Steinway sat in the corner. Every surface held something careful and precious and loved.

This was her room. The life that had been lived in her place.

Abigail's chest ached with something she didn't have a name for yet. She stepped inside.

Her eyes landed on a crystal music box resting on the piano lid. She reached out slowly, her calloused fingertip barely grazing the cold surface.

"Don't touch her things!"

The scream hit her like a physical blow.

Abigail spun around. A woman in a silk dressing gown stood in the doorway, her face twisted into something beyond anger — something closer to grief turned inside out. This was what Danita Richmond looked like when she stopped trying to hide it.

She lunged forward and shoved Abigail hard in the shoulder.

Abigail's back hit the wall with a painful thud. She bit down on the inside of her cheek.

Danita snatched the music box, turned it over in her hands, checking every angle for damage. Her fingers were shaking.

Abigail looked at the woman who had given birth to her and felt the temperature in her own blood drop several degrees.

"You do not belong in this room," Danita said. The words were quiet now. Somehow that was worse. "Get out."

No hug. No tears. Not even the performance of welcome.

"I'm sorry," Abigail whispered, and fled.

She found the dining room at the end of the first-floor hall. A mahogany table stretched the length of the room, set with silver that caught the light like small suns. At the head sat an elderly man with a hawk-nosed, severe face and a cane propped against his chair. Warren Richmond, the patriarch.

Hank was already seated, wearing a dry shirt, staring at his silverware as if she didn't exist.

Warren pointed to the chair across from Hank with the rubber tip of his cane. Abigail sat.

Danita arrived last. She didn't look at Abigail once. She sat down and reached for her wine glass.

Warren cleared his throat. "From today forward," he announced, his voice the kind that expected no argument, "Abigail is the only legal heir of this branch of the Richmond family."

The sound of silver screeching against porcelain. Danita had dragged her fork across her plate.

"Blood doesn't mean everything," Danita said, her voice dangerously soft. "I only have one daughter. And her name is Debbra."

Warren's face went purple. He slammed his palm on the table. "Debbra is a fraud! She has been sent away. You will not speak her name in this house!"

Hank moved so fast his chair shrieked across the floor. He was on his feet, his face pale with a fury that looked too big for the room, and then he was gone — out the door, footsteps hammering down the hallway.

The silence he left behind was suffocating.

Danita turned her head. Her eyes found Abigail for the first time all evening.

The look lasted only three seconds. But it was enough. It was the look of someone who had identified the source of everything that had gone wrong in their life and was deciding what to do about it.

Abigail looked down at the Beef Wellington on her plate. Her stomach cramped. She couldn't eat.

Warren's voice cut across the table. "Pick up your knife and fork. You will learn the rules of this house."

Her hands trembled. The silver clinked awkwardly against the porcelain, the sound filling the dead air of the enormous room. She put a piece of tasteless meat in her mouth and chewed.

One tear fell before she could stop it, hitting the expensive plate without a sound.

She thought about the crystal music box, and the photographs on the walls, and the sixteen years that girl had lived inside this house with these people.

She thought: they are not going to forgive me for existing. And there is nothing I can do about that.

She lay awake until the gray light of dawn crept across the ceiling.

Abigail pulled on her cleanest sweater, took three slow breaths at the door, and went downstairs.

She heard them before she saw them. A light, musical laugh — Danita's laugh, soft and real in a way it had never once been directed at Abigail. She stopped on the landing and peered through the balusters.

In the sunlit dining room below, Hank was handing Danita a piece of perfectly toasted bread. Danita smiled, touching his arm. It was a complete, self-contained world. Every piece in its place.

Abigail had shattered it just by arriving.

Her stomach growled. She had to eat. She forced herself down the stairs and into the dining room.

The laughter stopped the moment her foot crossed the threshold.

"Good morning," she said softly.

Silence.

Hank looked at his phone. Danita looked out the window, through Abigail, as if she were made of glass.

Then Abigail noticed the table. Two placemats. Two plates. Two cups.

The housekeeper materialized from the shadow near the kitchen door. "Your name was not on the list for breakfast service this morning, Miss," she said, her voice professionally blank.

So that was how it was going to be.

"That's okay," Abigail said. She kept her voice light. She found a glass, filled it with tap water from the sideboard pitcher, and sat at the far end of the long table, as small and far away as she could make herself.

The moment her chair scraped the floor, Danita set down her cup.

"It's suddenly very stuffy in here," she said, wrinkling her nose. She folded her napkin with precise, deliberate movements. "Have the car brought around. I'm going to the salon."

She left without a glance.

Hank stood a beat later, grabbing his blazer. "We leave for school in ten minutes," he said to the wall, and was gone.

Abigail sat alone in the enormous room, holding a glass of water.

She drank it in one long swallow and made herself a promise: she would not beg. She would not perform. She would treat this house like a hostile hotel, and she would expect absolutely nothing from the people inside it. It was the only way to get through this without breaking.

She reached into her canvas bag and closed her fingers around a battered brass pocket watch. Niall, her foster brother, had pressed it into her hands at the Ohio bus station four days ago. So you don't forget, he'd said, that somebody thinks you're worth finding.

She held it for exactly ten seconds. Then she let go, squared her shoulders, and walked out to the Escalade.

The driver hit the gas before she had fully settled into the seat. The SUV lurched forward, slamming her spine against the leather. She didn't make a sound. She just gripped the door handle and watched Boston rise up through the tinted glass.

Whatever was waiting for her at St. Jude's Preparatory School, she was going to need every bit of that steel she'd spent sixteen years building.

The Escalade hit a red light in downtown Boston, and Abigail saw him.

She almost missed it. Her eyes were unfocused against the window, tracing the edge of a public park, when the flash of white snagged her attention.

The boy from the balcony.

He was slumped on a wooden bench, head lolled to one side, wearing the same white button-down he'd had on yesterday. Except now it was smeared with dark dirt and rust-colored stains that looked a lot like dried blood. A purple bruise covered his left temple. His eyes were closed, his face slack with pain.

All of the reckless, manic energy she'd seen on the balcony was gone. He looked like something that had been broken and left there.

Abigail sat up straighter, pressing her hand to the glass.

In the front seat, Hank's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. He followed her line of sight. His jaw went rigid.

"Drive," he said quietly. "Don't stop."

The light turned green. The Escalade surged forward and the boy disappeared behind them.

Abigail didn't say anything. But she kept seeing the bruise. The blood on his shirt. The way his hand had been lying open on the bench, like he'd stopped bothering to hold onto anything.

A few blocks later, the car hit a wall of brake lights. A police cruiser was managing traffic at the intersection ahead — they were one block from the school. The Escalade rolled to a stop and sat.

Abigail looked at the door handle.

She thought about the handkerchief at the bottom of her bag, clean and white with hemmed edges, her foster mother's careful stitching. She thought about a person bleeding on a park bench while the world walked past.

"I think I dropped my orientation folder back there," she said, and pushed the door open.

She was out before Hank could turn his head.

She ran back through the cold air, canvas bag bouncing against her hip. The park came into view. The boy was still there, still in the same position, barely conscious.

She slowed her steps.

Up close, he looked younger than he had on the balcony, and worse. Much worse.

She didn't dare touch him. She didn't know him. She remembered the look he had sent through the window — that flat, hostile precision — and she stopped a careful distance away.

She dug the handkerchief out of her bag and crouched down. Gently, without touching him, she laid the folded white cloth on the bench slat beside his hand.

Then she stood up and ran.

She didn't know why she'd done it. It was just a piece of cloth. It couldn't fix a bruise that size, or whatever had happened to him the night before. But she'd spent two days in a house full of people who looked through her like she didn't exist, and she knew what it felt like to be invisible when you were hurting.

She wasn't willing to do that to someone else.

She arrived at St. Jude's Preparatory School gasping, hair windswept, and five minutes before the first bell. The courtyard was full of students stepping out of Porsches and Range Rovers in perfectly pressed uniforms, and Abigail in her worn sweater and scuffed sneakers moved through them like a wrong note in a practiced song.

She kept her head down and found the administration office.

Alistair Calloway, the Dean of Students, looked up from his mahogany desk, scanned her clothes in one dismissive sweep, and pushed a schedule and a plastic ID card across the desk.

"You are here because of the Richmond family's generous endowment," he said, his voice polished with contempt. "I suggest you keep your head down and do not drag down the junior class GPA. We have standards."

Abigail picked up the ID card. "Understood," she said, and left.

She was halfway down the main hallway, squinting at her schedule, when the warning bell screamed. The corridor emptied in seconds. She broke into a jog, spotted the plaque for AP Calculus, and turned the corner.

A body hit her like a freight train coming out of the stairwell.