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She should be in prison.

Olivia Warner is a murderer.

Am I the only one who thinks she’s more guilty than her boyfriend? He was drunk. She wasn’t. End of story.

Why wasn’t the girlfriend charged? She let her drunk boyfriend drive. It’s fucking disgusting.

There were at least a dozen more comments on the months-old article, but Olivia exited the newspaper website before her masochistic tendencies could make her scroll through the rest of the familiar comments.

She cleared the rest of the tabs on her phone and let it fall to the mattress before she closed her eyes and took in an unsteady breath.

All she heard for the next two minutes was the sound of her own breathing. It was so quiet in the pool house, and on mornings like that, it felt almost too quiet.

Because of her injuries, Olivia had needed to move from her second-story bedroom to the space that used to be her half- sister’s bedroom. She hadn’t minded since it meant getting some space from her mom, and Riley had been more than accommodating about switching rooms with her. Her half-sister had been living in the dorms at Georgetown anyway, so it was only over the summer that Riley had lived full-time in Olivia’s old bedroom.

The pool house had passed from Noah to Riley to Olivia, and there was a lot to love about the space, but Olivia often thought it was wasted on someone like her. The people who’d left those comments would have probably agreed.

She should have been used to it by now. The comments people had left on her old Instagram posts had been far worse than the ones on the article, but each one still wormed their way through her armor and left bruises.

People hated her, and she didn’t think she’d ever find a way to be okay with that. She may never have been a particularly likable person, but she’d also never been faced with such intense anger. What the people who condemned her online didn’t know, though, was that she hated herself more than they ever could.

Olivia didn’t need their comments to remind her that she was guilty. She knew it well enough without the messages people had sent her on Instagram before she’d deleted her account. Just like she’d already known that she didn’t deserve to be alive without needing to see the messages telling her to kill herself.

She didn’t need their hatred to know she should have died instead of Lucas.

Olivia swallowed past the painful lump in her throat and sat up. She should have died that night, but instead, she’d survived, studied in her hospital bed, graduated high school, and enrolled at Georgetown University, one of the few colleges she’d applied to before the accident in case she didn’t make it into any ballet companies.

She didn’t deserve any of it. She knew that, but wasting the rest of her life would have felt like even more of an injustice to Chris’s brother.

Olivia would have traded places with him if she could have, but without that as an option, she knew she couldn’t waste the life she’d been lucky enough to keep when he hadn’t. And today was the first step in ensuring she didn’t squander the chance she’d been given.

It was her first day of college classes. The first day she would be surrounded by people who might have known Drew and who might hate her. She was fucking terrified.

She was already dressed and ready to go, but Olivia wanted to double-check her appearance before Ella arrived. She got off the bed and walked to the pool house’s ensuite bathroom, her pace slow, thanks to her still-healing leg.

The cast might have been removed, but her leg still wasn’t quite strong enough for her to walk like she used to be able to.

Going from dancing several times a week to being bedridden and reliant on a wheelchair first and crutches later had been a big adjustment. Olivia might not have missed ballet much, but she did miss walking without struggle.

On her physiotherapist’s orders, she’d need to use crutches to get around Georgetown for the next few weeks, but it was a small price to pay in her eyes. Not even the memory of waking up, disorientated and confused, and seeing the bone protruding from her thigh was enough of a price to pay for her sins.

She doubted she’d ever settle the debt.

Olivia stepped in front of the bathroom mirror and forced herself to meet her own gaze.

A piece of metal had sliced through her face during the accident, leaving a permanent mark on her, just like the surgical scar running down her left leg. They were inescapable reminders of what had happened and her role in it.

The scar running down her forehead, through her right eyebrow, and ending in a small imperfection below her eye was mostly covered by her glasses and the bangs she’d gotten for the express purpose they were now fulfilling. Olivia hated that her new haircut made her look even more like her mom, but the bangs were mostly effective in hiding the mark. Make-up did the rest.

It wasn’t the scar on her face that made her hate mirrors, though.

It was her eyes she wanted to avoid. It was the guilt in them, the accusation they leveled at her own reflection that she wanted to escape from.

Olivia forced herself to meet those eyes for several more seconds before letting her gaze drop. She opened the cabinet beneath the sink and grabbed the orange bottle containing her painkillers. She’d healed to the point she didn’t need to take them regularly anymore, but she knew she’d likely need them before the end of the day.

She walked back to the bedroom and put the pills in her backpack. A voice inside her head tried to convince her to do something else with them, but, like so many times before, Olivia ignored it. She may have considered it for longer than she should have, and she may have stared at that orange bottle for too long. But she put them away.

With nothing else left to do, Olivia untucked the pale yellow shirt from her jeans and tucked it back in for the fifth time. She knew the slightly oversized shirt and mom jeans only made her look more petite and like a child drowning in her mother’s too-big clothes. At least they were better than the sundresses she’d tried on, which would be more comfortable in the heat but would also show off the large scar on the outside of her thigh. It was certainly better than the cropped and tight shirts Drew had liked on her.

Olivia sighed. She’d already tried on a dozen other options and rejected them all. This would have to do. She returned to the comfort of her messily made bed to wait for Ella. Her brother’s girlfriend had become one of Olivia’s favorite people in the last five months, and carpooling with her almost made Olivia excited about starting at Georgetown despite the nervous knot in her stomach.

“It’s open,” Olivia called out when a knock sounded on her door a few minutes later.

It wasn’t Ella who walked into her room, though. It was her dad. “Hey, Livvy,” he said, sending her a smile that was ninety percent affection and ten percent wariness.

Olivia had been even more combative with her mother since the accident, and her poor dad usually ended up in the crosshairs. It was no wonder he’d started looking nervous around her.

“Hey, Dad,” she replied, moving to the edge of the bed and setting her feet on the floor. “What’s up?”

His smile widened. “Just wanted to check in before Ella picks you up. Do you have everything you need?”

She nodded. “I’m an adult now, Dad, not seven,” she reminded him jokingly. “You don’t need to check that I’ve packed all my textbooks.”

He shrugged. “Old habits die hard, and you’ll always be my little girl.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. She’d stopped being his little girl a long time ago. “Yeah, yeah.”

Her dad pinned her with a look that told her he was being serious. “I know things haven’t been easy lately, but if you need anything, you send out the bat signal, okay?”

“Are you calling yourself Batman?” Olivia asked.

“Just creating a comparison. It’s called a metaphor,” he explained with a long-suffering sigh. “Are you sure you’re ready for college?”

Her jaw dropped open, and she grabbed the closest ammunition she could find. Her slipper hit his chest unobstructed before falling to the floor. Her dad arched an eyebrow at her.

Olivia scowled. She should have thrown something harder. “Did you come here to check on me or to insult my intelligence?”

He smiled. “Why can’t it be both?”

“You’re the worst,” Olivia groaned. “Please vacate my room immediately.”

“Fine, fine.” He backed up to the still-open door. “Good luck for today. I know you’ll smash it.”

Olivia’s grin finally escaped. His kind words meant more to her than he’d ever know. They were exactly what she needed. “Thanks, Dad.”

“See you later.”

He closed the door behind him, but Olivia’s mood remained lighter as she waited for Ella. Her dad had always been her favorite parent. She still hated that he, Noah, and her mom had taken Riley on a family trip to D.C. without her and that he’d happily invited Riley into his workshop when she’d still felt unwelcome there after an incident with spilled paint years earlier. But he’d worked hard to repair the damage since she’d made her hurt feelings known.

Unlike Olivia’s mother, he’d done enough to show her that she wasn’t second best.

Instead of lying back down, Olivia went on her phone, this time to reply to a message from her friend Amy. The two of them had been really close in high school, but they’d grown apart after the accident. Olivia was probably to blame because of how withdrawn she’d become in the weeks after Chris’s birthday.

Whatever the cause, she was trying to be a better friend and close that distance, especially with Amy attending a different college. They still lived less than a fifteen-minute drive apart, but they barely hung out anymore, and Olivia hoped that would change.

She replied to the message from Amy and asked if they could meet up that weekend, and then mindlessly scrolled through Pinterest until Ella arrived.

When Ella walked into the pool house wearing an outfit far more summer-appropriate than hers, she got up and put her backpack over both shoulders.

“Hey, Ella.” She reached for the crutches that were leaning against the bedroom wall and lessened the weight she was putting on her left leg.

“Hey, Olivia.” Her brother’s girlfriend sent her a nervous smile. “So, remember how excited we were about carpooling together? Just the two of us?”

Olivia tried not to let the disappointment show on her face. “Yeah,” she replied, drawing out the word.

Ella wrung her hands together. “Well, my stupid car battery died this morning, which is why I’m late.”

“Oh.” Olivia winced in sympathy. “That sucks.” Her eyebrows drew together. “But how did you get here, then?”

Ella licked her lips. “Here’s the thing. When my car didn’t start, I called Noah. The plan was for him to jump-start it, but that didn’t work.”

Olivia’s stomach dropped. She had a bad feeling about where this was going. “So, he dropped you off here so you and I can Uber to campus together?” she asked, trying to be hopeful.

Ella grimaced. “Not exactly. He didn’t want us to Uber. Some protective alpha male bullshit,” she said with a roll of her eyes that Olivia could tell she didn’t mean. “Anyway, they’re waiting for us in the car.”

“They, as in…?”

“Noah, Brady.” Ella paused before the next name, her expression turning apologetic. “And Chris.”

“I’m surprised he’s even allowing this,” Olivia said with a humorless laugh.

To think she’d once had a major crush on her brother’s friend. That there’d been a time when the two of them could joke around, and he hadn’t wished her dead. It felt like an eternity ago, but Olivia longed for that time.

“If you’d prefer to Uber, I’ll make it happen,” Ella said. She knew how much Chris hated her. Everyone in their friend and family circle did. “I’ll just tell Noah you’re running late and that they should leave without us.”

Olivia tipped her head back and sighed. “No, it’s fine. Let’s go”

If Chris could handle being in the same car as her, she sure as hell should also be able to.