He was following me.
Slowly.
After a few minutes, I stopped.
My heart was pounding, and my body felt like it was begging me to sit down.
Then the horn sounded.
I jumped.
Carter lowered the window.
“Don’t start with the drama. Keep moving.”
So I walked.
That was how it began.
Every morning, Carter woke me early.
Every morning, I went outside.
If I slowed down, he honked.
If I sat on the curb, he told me I looked ridiculous.
Sometimes he took pictures of me.
At night, he showed them to me.
“Look at yourself,” he said once. “If you keep working, maybe in a month you’ll look human again.”
That sentence hurt more than I wanted to admit.
I stopped arguing.
Instead, I cried quietly in the bathroom with the water running.
I thought Lily couldn’t hear me.
She could.
One afternoon, she came to me and whispered:
