But then I heard it, a sound that cut through her performance, through the whispers that were just starting to ripple through the crowd. It was Liam’s voice, and it was a voice I hadn’t heard since he was a sixteen-year-old boy standing up to a loan shark on our front porch. It was low, dangerously quiet, and colder than a mountain winter.

“Victoria,” he said, and the silence that followed was absolute. “What did you just do?”

He wasn’t asking a question. He was passing a sentence. And I knew right then that while she may have shattered a glass, she had just destroyed a life—her own.