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.

The final bell rang at 3:30 PM, and the sky opened up.

A freezing Boston rain came down in sheets. Abigail had no umbrella. She zipped her jacket to her chin and stepped into it.

The Escalade was idling at the curb, Hank visible through the tinted glass, already staring at his phone. She jogged through the puddles, sneakers soaking through immediately, and reached for the rear door handle.

Hank's head snapped up.

He wasn't looking at her. He was looking past her, across the busy street, his body going completely rigid.

Abigail turned.

A girl in a white trench coat stood half-hidden under the striped awning of a small café. A gust of wind caught her hood and pulled it back, and for one brief, exposed second, Abigail saw her face — or enough of it. Long blonde hair. The unmistakable angle of a jaw she had spent two days memorizing from framed photographs on a pink bedroom wall.

"Debbra!"

Hank's voice came through the car door, raw and cracked, a sound she had not heard from him before. He threw the passenger door open.

He ran into the street.

He did not look at the traffic. He simply ran, and a yellow cab locked up its brakes ten feet away, tires shrieking on the wet asphalt, the bumper stopping less than a foot from his knees. The driver screamed out the window. Hank didn't even glance at him.

The girl under the awning turned at the commotion. Her face was obscured by the driving rain. For a second she was perfectly still — and then she spun and disappeared into a narrow alley between the buildings, swallowed by shadow before Hank had even made it across the center line.

He crashed through the cafe's outdoor tables and stood at the mouth of the alley, calling her name into the dark. His voice echoed back empty.

Abigail stood in the rain and watched him pace.

She had thought his cruelty came from coldness. She understood now that she'd been wrong. It came from something much harder to hate: grief. He had lost someone he loved, and he was held together by anger because the alternative was coming apart entirely.

When Hank finally walked back across the street, he was soaked through. His hair dripped into his eyes. He stopped in front of Abigail, and his chest heaved, and his face was a map of something terrible.

"This is your fault."

The words came out quiet. That was worse than shouting.

"If you hadn't come back," he said, "she wouldn't be out there."

Abigail opened her mouth. She wanted to say: I didn't ask to be born. I didn't ask to be switched. I didn't choose any of this any more than you did. But she looked at the red rims of his eyes, the way his hands were shaking, and the words dissolved. You could not reason with grief. You could only get out of its way.

He ripped the car door open. "Get in."

She climbed into the back seat and pressed herself into the corner. The Escalade tore from the curb. The rain hammered the roof.

Abigail stared at the back of Hank's wet head. She thought about a girl in a white trench coat, vanishing into an alley in the rain. She thought about the way Danita had said her name is Debbra — not was. Present tense. A refusal to let go.

Debbra wasn't a name in this family. She was a gravity. Everything in the Richmond house orbited around a girl who wasn't here, and Abigail had been dropped into the center of that orbit like a stone into a solar system — not evil, not malicious, just fundamentally, catastrophically in the wrong place.

The SUV took a hard turn. Abigail's head knocked against the window. Pain flared.

She kept her mouth shut. She kept her face still.

She was starting to understand that surviving this house was going to require a very specific kind of endurance — not just toughness, but patience. The patience to wait for people to stop hating you for something you didn't do.

She wasn't sure she had that much patience. But she was going to have to find it.