By the time the clock struck midnight, that whisper was going to cost her everything.

My name is Bethany Burns. I am thirty-one years old, and I was raised in Millbrook, Pennsylvania, a hamlet so insignificant that our only traffic jam in history occurred when Old Man Henderson’s prize heifer wandered onto Main Street and decided to nap. I fled that town at eighteen with a single suitcase, two hundred dollars stuffed in my sock, and a stubborn refusal to suffocate.

I didn’t leave because I hated the countryside. I left because my family made it explicitly clear that the inn was full.

I have an older brother, Garrett. He was the Golden Child, the sun around which my parents’ universe orbited. Growing up, I was the shadow cast by his brilliance. If I scraped a B on a math test, Garrett had brought home an A+. If I made the varsity softball team, Garrett was being crowned homecoming king. My mother, Patricia, had a specific way of looking at me—a mixture of fatigue and disappointment—as if I were a rough draft she had crumpled up and tossed aside, while Garrett was the framed masterpiece.

So, I ran. I took a Greyhound bus to the city and started over.