And she hated that her mother had been helping her shop for homecoming dresses and was buried before Thanksgiving.
No junior prom dress shopping. No junior prom.
She barely remembered her senior year; she didn’t even make it to find out she got into Fisk.
It had spread so fast.
She hated that her friends and family and perfect strangers spoke to her in hushed tones and assumed she was broken.
She hated they were right.
Because the ache inside her was relentless. It constantly missed her brother. It constantly missed her mother. It would not abate. It could not be moved. She was thoroughly, horribly, broken and all that brokenness was put up for examination by an entire town. And that just couldn’t happen here.
For the whole of her life, the whole of Green Valley and treated her differently, and she absolutely hated it.
But she wasn’t in Green Valley now. And Daisy Payton had a plan.
She would have a roommate, her father’s meddling be damned. No one would ever know she was the daughter of the owner of largest lumber mill in eastern Tennessee because she was going to do what everyone else did with their influential connections. Hide them.
And she was going to do what everyone else did with their hurts and disappointments. Tuck them away and ignore them till they didn’t hurt anymore.
She was going to be just like everyone else.
But first she was going to get rid of Dolly.