Chapter 5 Why is everyone against me

I didn't move for a long time.

I just sat there looking at that document with my father's signature on it and I felt something shift inside me. Not break. I was past breaking. It was more like a door closing. Quietly, with a click, the way doors close when someone has made a final decision and everyone in the room knows it.

"She thinks it's for the best," I repeated.

"Trixie —"

"She thinks it's for the best." I looked up at him. "What do you think, Dad?"

He looked away first. He picked up his glass and looked at it instead of me.

"I think we need to keep this family together," he said.

"This family," I said slowly. "You mean Kiara's family. Because last time I checked I was in it too."

"You are."

"Then why does every decision in this house go against me?"

He set the glass down. He looked tired. He had been looking tired for years now, my father, and I used to feel sorry for it. I used to make excuses for it in my head. He was under pressure. He was doing his best. He was caught between two families and trying to keep everything level.

Sitting across from him now with that withdrawal letter between us, I couldn't find those excuses anymore.

"She's not going to change," I said. "You know that. You've known it for years. She is never going to treat me the way she treats Trisha and you are never going to ask her to. That's just the truth of it, isn't it?"

"Trixie, that's not —"

"Is it the truth or not?"

He was quiet.

And there it was. Right there in the silence. The answer I had spent eleven years not letting myself hear because hearing it would mean something I wasn't ready for. He knew exactly what Kiara was. He had always known. And he had chosen her anyway, over and over, every single time, and he was going to keep choosing her because the alternative cost more than he was willing to pay.

I stood up.

"I'm not withdrawing," I said.

"Trixie."

"You signed that without my consent. I'm eighteen. They came to me. The contract is mine." I picked up the withdrawal letter from the coffee table and folded it and put it in my pocket. "I'm not withdrawing."

I walked upstairs before he could answer.

---

I didn't sleep.

I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house settle around me and I thought about what Kylian had asked me in that corridor. Why do you let people talk to you that way? I had said I reacted where no one could see it and he had said that must be exhausting.

He was right. It was exhausting. It had been exhausting for eleven years and I had gotten so used to the weight of it that I'd stopped noticing I was carrying it.

I got up at six and got dressed and went to school alone.

---

I was sitting on the steps outside the east entrance eating a cereal bar and not really tasting it when Dalton appeared.

He came around the corner with his bag over one shoulder and his head down and he almost walked past me entirely before he stopped. He looked at me sitting there on the steps. I looked at him standing on the pavement.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

Then he sat down.

Not close. There was a full step between us and he put his bag down and leaned his arms on his knees and looked out at the car park and said nothing. I watched him from the corner of my eye and waited for whatever this was.

"I was out of line yesterday," he said.

I turned to look at him fully.

He wasn't looking at me. He was still looking at the car park.

"In the meeting." He paused. "What I said. It wasn't useful. It was just mean."

I stared at him.

He looked like it had cost him something to say. Not a lot Dalton Yates was not a person who found humility expensive but something. A small coin dropped into a jar he didn't usually open.

"Okay," I said.

He glanced at me sideways. "That's it?"

"What do you want me to say?"

He almost smiled. Not the performance smile he wore in hallways and on ice. Something smaller and less rehearsed.

"I don't know," he said. "Most people make it a bigger thing."

"I'm not most people," I said.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he picked up his bag and stood and looked down at me.

"No," he said. "You're really not."

He walked inside.

I sat there on the steps for another minute, cereal bar forgotten in my hand, and tried to figure out what to do with that. It didn't fit anywhere in the version of Dalton Yates I had been carrying around in my chest since the day he moved me aside like a door and kissed my stepsister in front of me. It didn't fit and I didn't trust it and I wasn't going to trust it.

But I sat with it anyway.

---

My phone rang at two in the afternoon.

I was in the library, pretending to study, and I looked at the screen and didn't recognize the number. I stepped outside into the corridor and picked up.

"It's Kylian."

I leaned against the wall. "How did you get this number?"

"Monica." A pause. "Is that a problem?"

"No." I shifted my bag. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. The contract is ready to move forward. The formal signing is being scheduled for the gala." Another pause. "I just wanted to ask you directly. Not through school. Not through your parents."

"Ask me what?"

"If you're still in."

I thought about the withdrawal letter folded in my jacket pocket. My father's handwriting at the bottom. Kiara's decision to wear his signature.

I thought about Kylian in that corridor asking me why I let people speak to me that way and waiting for an answer without filling the silence for me.

"Yes," I said. "I'm still in."

He was quiet for a beat. "Good."

"Kylian." I hesitated. "Your mother. Yesterday in that office. She knew my stepmother."

"I know."

"You knew she would be there."

He didn't deny it. "Yes."

"Are you going to tell me why?"

"Not yet," he said. "But I will."

He hung up.

I stood in the corridor holding my phone and turning that over in my mind. Not yet but I will. Not a deflection. A promise. And something about the way he'd said it made me believe it, which was either good instinct or the beginning of a serious mistake.

I pushed off the wall and turned to go back into the library.

Trisha was standing in the corridor behind me.

She had her bag over one shoulder and her eyes were on my phone and I knew immediately from her face that she had heard. Not everything. But enough.

I straightened. "How long have you been there?"

She didn't answer that. She looked at me for a moment and really looked at me and her face was doing something I had never seen it do before. Not the smooth calculation she usually wore. Not the satisfied amusement of someone watching a plan work.

She looked almost frightened.

"You really have no idea what you're walking into," she said quietly.

"Trisha —"

But she was already walking away. Heels on the corridor floor, steady and unhurried, and she didn't look back.

I stood there and watched her go.

And the thing that stayed with me the thing I couldn't shake for the rest of the day was that she hadn't looked like someone who was winning.

She looked like someone scared.