Chapter 31
KISAREL
My eyes slowly peeled open like a heavy lead was placed on them.
I winced at the sharp pain I felt in my head, and when my hand flew to the side of my head where it hurt, I feh warn impard trickling down there.
“Jesus…” I sat up immediately, the entire room spinning in my blurry eyes.
I took in the sight around me, and I was in my room. Not in the hospital. But in my room, lying down in the very mess Moon had made.
My clothes were thrown out of the closet, my safe emptied, and turned upside down with its contents all gone
“Oh, God.” The words slipped out of me as I dropped to my knees in front of it, my fingers trembling as I grabbed it and flipped it over, like maybe–maybe I had missed something. Maybe something had gotten stuck inside. Maybe….
I refused to accept the fact that everything I had kept hidden in there was all gone. But they were all gone.
Tears blurred my vision almost instantly, spilling over faster than I could wipe them away.
I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and sat with it for exactly as long as I could afford to.
Then I stood up and headed for the living room.
stopped for a second when I got down the stairs, taking in the sight of the living room that looked nothing like the one I had grown up in.
The men were done with the rearrangement already.
How long have I been out?
Moon’s laughter caught my attention.
She was in the far corner of the living room, standing in front of the long mirror Freda had just had installed, holding one of my dresses up against herself. The very one that had cost me two hundred and eighty dollars of money I hadn’t even earned yet.
The bags. All eight of them were sitting open on the floor around her feet like she had found a gift left specifically for her.
Freda was on the sofa watching with a small, approving smile.
Something snapped clean inside me.
I crossed the room in seconds, reached into the nearest bag, and pulled out two dresses before Moonie had even registered I was there.
“What are you-” She spun around.
I grabbed for a third bag.
Moonie’s hand shot out and shoved me backward. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Those are mine.” My voice came out shaking, but I didn’t care. “They’re mine. I bought them- 1/3
PPPP
Chapter 31
“With what money?” Moonie looked me over with the slow contempt she reserved for moments she was genuine “You. Bought these.” She picked up the price tag still attached to the dress in her hand and held it out toward me exactly does a receptionist–turned–PA get this kind of money, Kisarel?”
“It’s a loan. My boss advanced it against my salary-
“A loan.” Freda’s voice came from the sofa as she stood up slowly. “Is that what we’re calling it.
“Freda-”
“Don’t” She crossed toward me. “I want you to look me in the eye and tell me your boss gave you sixty thousand dollars worth of clothes as a salary advance.” She stopped directly in front of me. “Look me in the eye and say it.”
“It’s the truth-
“You have been sleeping around.” She said. “Sleeping around to buy clothes. Sleeping around to get expensive watches you hide in boxes in your room like stolen goods. Her eyes moved over my face with a coldness that I had grown up in and never once gotten used to. “And the necklace.” Her voice dropped. The necklace I have been looking for since the week your mother was buried. For ten years, I looked for that necklace in this house, and you had it. Hidden. From me. She stepped closer. “In my house. You hid your mother’s necklace from me in my own house.”
“It was never your house,” I said. “And that necklace was never yours. My mother gave it to me—”
Her palm connected with my face so hard my head snapped sideways.
I caught myself on the arm of the nearest chair and stayed there for a moment, bent over it, breathing through the ringing in my ears.
“It was never yours,” Freda said. “Nothing in this family was ever yours. You were a charity case the day we took you in, and you have been a charity case every day since.”
I straightened up and turned back to face her.
“My mother gave me that necklace,” I said again, quieter this time. “It was mine.”
The second slap landed before I had finished the sentence.
The force of it knocked me sideways, and I hit the floor on one knee and stayed there for a moment with both hands flat on Freda’s new expensive carpet and the room tilting around me and the taste of blood from where my teeth had caught the inside of my cheek.
Moonie was watching from behind Freda with the expression of someone at a show they had paid good money for
I got up off the floor.
“Pack a bag,” Freda said, already turning away from me and moving back toward her new sofa. “You are not sleeping under this roof tonight. Or any night after this.”
I looked at her back with almost no ability to feel shocked anymore. All I felt was numbness.
“You’re kicking me out,” I said.
“I’m done housing an ungrateful, deceitful little girl who hides things from the family that saved her life.” She sat down, smoothed her blouse, and picked up her phone. “You have twenty minutes.”
“And what about my things?” I pointed at the bags Moonie guarded like her life depended on it.
2/3
10:34 am Pppp.
Chapter 31
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I stood there for a moment, not knowing what else to say. Then, I turned around, went upstairs and some the whey could take, including the stranger’s jacket, and walked out the door

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