Chapter 3

The bell above the door jingled as I walked into Miller’s Floral. I had worked part-time here for two years, but today, I was here to quit. 

The shop was quiet. Two older women browsing the petunias took one look at me, put their heads together, and started whispering furiously.

"Isn't that the girl fighting her brother over the family estate?" one of them muttered.

"That's her," the other hissed back. "I heard she tried to throw that poor adopted girl and her own brother out on the street just to keep every last dime for herself."

"Lord have mercy. Honestly, good for Cole for standing up to his own blood like that."

They didn't even buy anything. They just hurried out the door, shooting me dirty looks on their way past.

I walked up to the counter. Mrs. Miller didn't greet me. 

She just pulled out a thin yellow envelope, and slid it across the glass counter. My final pay.

"Mrs. Miller?" 

She finally looked up, her expression hard. "Girl, your brother’s done right by that poor girl all these years. You oughta be ashamed of yourself."

I didn't argue. In Oak Creek, once folks made up their minds, you couldn't change them with a crowbar. I took the envelope and walked out. 

I headed straight to the local grocery store. I just needed some bread and a few canned goods to take back to Grandma's. I set my basket on the checkout belt. 

Becky, a girl I went to high school with, was running the register. She grabbed the plastic divider and violently shoved my groceries right back down the belt toward me.

"We don’t serve greedy folks around here," Becky sneered. 

A man behind me in line snorted. "Taking an orphan's home. Ain't that something."

I stared at Becky for a second. Then I turned around, left my groceries sitting right there on the belt, and walked out the door.

Things were getting out of hand. I just needed to hold on until fall. Atlanta Culinary Institute was my ticket out of this town. 

I rode Grandma’s bike back to her house and checked the rusted mailbox by the dirt road. Inside was a thick, crisp envelope with the culinary school’s crest printed on the corner. 

I ripped it open right there in the driveway. 

Dear Ms. Hale,

Due to widespread allegations concerning your character and the ongoing family dispute, we are revoking your admission offer.

I stopped breathing. I read the sentence three times. My hands shook so hard the paper rattled. 

How? We lived in a tiny farming town hours away from Atlanta. How did a fancy culinary school even hear about local Oak Creek drama? 

I found out twenty minutes later. 

My buddy Tommy from the gas station pulled into Grandma's driveway in his beat-up Chevy. He walked up to the porch, looking everywhere but at me, and handed me a black VHS cassette. 

"Half the county's passing this around, Willa," Tommy mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck. "I figured you should know what they're looking at."

I took the tape inside and shoved it into Grandma’s old VCR. The TV screen flickered with static, then snapped to a home recording. 

It was footage from last month’s private estate hearing. 

But it was heavily chopped up. Someone had used a double-deck VCR to edit out every single word Maeve said. It only showed me. It showed me standing up, crying, and slamming my fists on the wood table, demanding the restaurant back. The audio had a cheap voiceover recorded on top of it: Watch the greedy sister kick the poor orphan out on the street.

My blood ran ice cold. 

That hearing was sealed. The only person in this whole town who was given a private copy of the tape was Cole. 

I yanked the cord from the wall, grabbed the kitchen phone, and dialed Hale’s BBQ. 

"Hale's Barbecue, home of the best sauce in Georgia!" Maeve’s syrupy, sweet voice trilled through the receiver. 

"Put my brother on," I said. 

She let out a nasty little laugh. "Aww, poor Willa. Everybody hates you now. Are you finally gonna beg Cole for forgiveness?"

She stole the tape. She edited it. She mailed it to the culinary school. 

"You’ll regret this."I said.

I slammed the phone down on the hook before she could utter another fake gasp. 

By Sunday, the whole town felt like a pressure cooker. I couldn't even walk down Main Street without someone spitting on the sidewalk near my boots. 

I was walking past the First Baptist Church right as Sunday service was wrapping up. The big wooden doors were propped wide open to let the summer heat out. Cole was standing at the pulpit. I stopped dead in my tracks. 

"My sister’s been going through a hard time," Cole’s deep, ragged voice echoed over the PA system. "I don’t blame her. She’s still family. Please, don’t be hard on her."

Through the open church doors, I could hear a few older women in the back row whispering loudly. 

"So money-hungry at her age. Lord knows how she'll turn out later," one woman clucked.

"Cole worked his fingers to the bone for that family, and she turned out to be a total ingrate. All she cares about is the estate," another muttered.

"And what did that poor adopted girl ever do wrong?" a third chimed in, shaking her head. "Living on charity is hard enough without being bullied out of the house!"

He was playing the tragic, forgiving hero, feeding me to the wolves while soaking up the whole town's praise.

Grandma couldn't handle the stress of the neighbors gossiping. That afternoon, I packed up my duffel bag, moved out, and rented a rusted-out metal trailer at the edge of the county lines just to have a place to live. It was a dump, smelling of stale beer and mildew, but it gave me a roof over my head and kept me out of sight.

At least, I thought it was.

CRASH.

I jerked awake at 2 AM as the trailer's thin front window shattered. A cobblestone rolled across the cheap linoleum floor. 

I crawled to the busted window and peered out into the dark. I saw fresh white spray paint splashed across the aluminum side of my trailer. 

INGRATE.

At 6 AM sharp, the park manager was hammering his fist against my door. 

"Get your trash and get out of my park!" he hollered through the broken glass. "I run a decent place! I ain't dealing with this nonsense. You got one hour!"

As I was stuffing my clothes back into my bag on the muddy dirt patch outside, a kid from my old high school rode up on his BMX bike. He handed me a folded slip of paper. 

"Deputy Hale told me to give this to you," the kid said, spinning his pedals backward. 

I opened the note. Cole's messy handwriting stared back at me. 

Quit being stubborn. Come home.

Come home. To the house they stole. To the reputation they dragged through the mud. He actually thought breaking me down and starving me out would make me crawl back to the house, ready to play the obedient, quiet little sister in the background of Maeve’s perfect life. 

I crumpled the note and tossed it into a muddy puddle. 

They thought they had won. Cole and Maeve thought that taking my family, my house, and my future would leave me with nothing. 

They were wrong. They left me with nothing to lose.