. CHAPTER 2 — The Girl Nobody Helped
Mia heard people speaking, but their voices sounded far away, as if she were underwater.
“Call the nurse.”
“Is she bleeding?”
“Did she fall?”
“She didn’t fall,” someone muttered, but too quietly to matter.
Mia’s fingers curled against the cold marble. Pain shot up her leg where the prosthetic had twisted wrong. She tried to sit up, but her body refused. Shame hurt almost worse than the fall. She could feel every eye on her, every phone camera waiting to decide whether she was tragic, embarrassing, or entertaining.
Madison came down the stairs slowly, her face arranged into shock.
“I didn’t push her,” she said before anyone accused her. “She grabbed my dress and lost her balance.”
Mia looked up. “That’s not true.”
Madison’s friends nodded too fast. “We saw it. She tripped.”
A teacher knelt beside Mia, but even he looked uncertain. Jefferson Prep lived on donor checks, and Madison’s family had a wing named after them. Her father funded the arts center. Her stepmother sat on the board. Her brother Ethan was the school’s golden boy, the kind of student whose mistakes were called pressure and whose silence was called maturity.
Mia was a scholarship student with a secondhand backpack.
The math was simple.
“Can you stand?” the teacher asked.
Mia swallowed a sob. “I don’t know.”
Someone stepped closer. Ethan.
He was seventeen, tall, blond, wearing a dark green jacket over a white shirt. Mia had seen him across campus a hundred times and avoided him every time. He was Madison’s brother — not by blood, but by the new marriage that had turned Madison into a Vale. That was enough to make him dangerous.
Ethan crouched near the photographs.
His hand reached for one.
“Don’t,” Mia whispered.
But he had already picked it up.
The picture was old and slightly bent. Two children sat outside a hospital. A little girl with a bandaged leg leaned against a blond boy wrapped in a gray blanket. Their faces were younger, thinner, frightened — but unmistakable.
Ethan stared at it.
The noise around them faded from his expression.
Madison’s voice sharpened. “Ethan, put that down.”
He didn’t move.
Mia’s eyes filled. “It’s nothing.”
May you like
Ethan looked at her slowly, and for the first time since he had become a name whispered in hallways, he looked afraid.
“No,” he said, barely breathing. “This isn’t nothing.”
