Chapter 3

I didn't sleep that night.

I sat there shirtless on the cold cement floor and smoked an entire pack of cheap cigarettes.

The embers glowed and faded in the dark, like my crumbling self-worth.

Just before dawn, I heard the lock turn.

My head snapped up.

Audrey stood in the doorway. Her hair was tangled, her left cheek badly swollen, her thin T-shirt torn at the collar, revealing a bruised shoulder underneath.

She had escaped.

The moment she saw me, her tears broke loose. She threw herself into my arms like a wounded animal, clinging to the back of my neck with both hands.

"Kyle… Kyle, I'm so sorry… I didn't know they were following me…"

She was shaking as she cried, her tears falling heavy and hot onto my shoulder.

I raised my rough, callused hand, held it there in the air for a moment, then finally pulled her close.

"Does it hurt?" I touched her swollen cheek, my voice so hoarse it barely sounded like mine.

"No." She shook her head hard and buried her face against my chest. "Kyle, let's run away together. Let's leave and go somewhere no one knows us. I don't need a house. I just need you."

Run away together.

Such a romantic, naive idea.

But the reality was that my bank account held less than thirty thousand dollars — every cent Audrey and I had scraped together over three years, set aside for a down payment.

In a city where even a modest apartment cost two million dollars, thirty thousand couldn't buy you a bathroom.

I looked into Audrey's eyes, so full of hope, and felt an invisible hand squeeze my heart until I couldn't breathe.

I couldn't run away with her.

I couldn't let her spend her life hiding with me, slowly falling apart in the shadows of this city.

She had once been the most radiant girl on campus. It was because of me that she had cut ties with her family and fallen into all of this.

"Audrey… give me one month."

I took a deep breath, pushed down the ache rising in my chest, cupped her face in my hands, and said it slowly, word by word: "Five hundred thousand. I'll figure it out. I promise I'll buy us our own place downtown."

Audrey went still. She stared at me, a flicker of panic crossing her face. "Kyle, don't do anything stupid. We can save up slowly. I'm not in a rush…"

"I am!"

I raised my voice, my eyes red as I held her gaze. "I'm done with the way your mother looks at me. I'm done letting you live somewhere the door won't even close all the way. I'm a man, Audrey. I won't let everyone look down on you because of me."

The look in my eyes scared her. She opened her mouth but said nothing. She just held me tighter and cried even harder — with a kind of despair that broke something deep inside me.

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