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.

The impact drove the breath from her lungs and sent her crashing into the marble floor. Pain detonated up her spine. The fluorescent lights swam. For a terrible second she couldn't pull in air at all — just lay there with her vision blurring and her hands flat against the cold stone, fighting her own body for oxygen.

Her papers had scattered everywhere.

The boy who had hit her stood over her, running a hand through his hair with the irritated look of someone who had somewhere to be. He was wearing a crimson varsity football jacket. He didn't offer a hand.

He didn't even really look at her — not until he bent down and picked up a sheet of paper from the floor. He held it up, scanning it, and then went very still.

ABIGAIL RICHMOND. Printed in clean black type across the top.

The annoyance on his face dissolved. What replaced it was something uglier and more deliberate.

This was Dylon Waller. Star quarterback. Hank's best friend. And from the look on his face right now, he already knew exactly who she was.

"So you're the hick," he said. His voice carried down the empty hallway without effort. "The one who forced Debbra out."

Debbra. Abigail had heard the name only once before — screamed by Warren at the dinner table, forbidden, explosive. Now here it was again, and this time she could feel the weight of it, the way everyone around her seemed to orbit that name like a wound they couldn't stop pressing on.

She got to her feet. She didn't argue. She didn't look away.

Dylon didn't like that. He had expected flinching, and she wasn't giving him any.

He crumpled her schedule deliberately, slowly, making sure she watched every second of it, and dropped it into the metal trash can nearby with a sharp clang.

"Trash belongs with trash," he said pleasantly.

Abigail's eyes went to the trash can. Then back to him. Her face was completely blank.

That blankness infuriated him more than tears would have.

He crouched down and grabbed the strap of her canvas bag, pulling her forward until his face was inches from hers. He smelled of expensive aftershave and the stale certainty of someone who had never been told no in his entire life.

"Stay the hell away from Hank," he hissed.

Abigail jerked her bag free. "Excuse me," she said, her voice flat and even. "I have class."

For just a moment, Dylon looked genuinely thrown. Like the script had skipped a page.

The door to AP Calculus swung open. Mrs. Evelyn Reed, sharp-eyed behind her glasses, fixed Dylon with a withering look. "Mr. Waller. My hallway is not a stage."

He scoffed, deliberately drove his shoulder into Abigail's bruised arm as he passed, and swaggered away.

Abigail walked to the trash can. She reached inside, retrieved the crumpled ball of paper, and smoothed it methodically against her thigh until it was flat enough to read.

She walked into the classroom.

Thirty pairs of eyes turned toward her at once. The silence had a texture to it — thick and unkind. Whispers erupted from the back row.

She chose the rear corner desk, sat down, and pressed her textbook against the wrinkled paper until the creases disappeared. Then she looked up at the equations on the whiteboard.

She had been doing mathematics at the top of her rural Ohio class since she was twelve years old. Whatever else this school was going to take from her, it couldn't take that.

She picked up her pen, and began.