I’d always known my parents favored my brother over us girls, even as a little kid. But I never imagined that after losing three daughters, they’d still be plotting how to cash in on me. That day, I didn’t go inside. I avoided the main roads and cut through the woods all the way back to the town where my school was. I walked from sunset to sunrise without stopping, until I reached the police station. The moment I saw the cops, I collapsed. When I came to, the first thing I said was: “I need to report a murder. My parents killed my sisters.” My memories of the two months after filing that report are pretty fuzzy. Everything was complete chaos. My parents screaming at me, neighbors treating me like garbage, classmates looking at me like I was some kind of monster. I got so thin I barely looked human anymore. After my parents got arrested, my brother and I ended up in the system. Since he was a boy and still little, some family adopted him from foster care pretty fast. We completely lost touch. But I was stuck in that nightmare. Everyone who saw me would point and whisper: “That’s the girl whose parents killed her sisters, then she ratted out her own family. Whole bunch of them are psychos…” Finally, my homeroom teacher couldn’t take it anymore. She pulled some strings through her family to get my records sealed and had me transferred to a group home in another state. Before she left, she told me: “Starting today, you’re Ella Morgan. Leave the past behind and build your own future.” My teacher was just a fresh college grad–she couldn’t take me in herself. She’d already done way more than she had to. I once heard her arguing with her family about me: “I’m partly to blame for what happened to those girls. I’m the one who kept her at school! If she’d gone home during that time, maybe none of this would’ve happened…” When she told me to forget the past, she meant I should forget her too. I knew it wasn’t her fault, but I got it. From that point on, it was just me. Every birthday in foster care, I made the same wish: to have a real family someday. I barely graduated high school. With my shit grades, community college was my only shot. I was always broke, so when I saw this ad for some kind of program that actually paid you while you trained, I jumped on it. After a few days of intensive courses, I passed their final test. That’s where I first saw Alex. Truth is, I figured out what kind of operation it was during the training. After one sleepless night of freaking out, I made peace with it. Even though changing my name meant nobody knew my backstory, I couldn’t pretend my screwed–up childhood hadn’t messed me up. Growing up, nobody taught me about right and wrong. Nobody taught me to have any self–respect. I just stumbled through life completely on my own. noveldramaThat program was probably my only chance to change everything. So I had to take it. But in my past life, being so desperate for a family got me killed. Now that I’d somehow gotten a do–over, even that was slipping away. Looking at all these college kids around me, I could see none of them had that haunted look that comes from surviving hell. I envied them so much. I had no idea what to do next.