She broke the spell, and just like that, she could see everything with fresh eyes.

Everything her mother once claimed to be protecting her from turned out to be a lie. The street they lived on wasn’t unsafe. The Girl Scout leader wasn’t a terrible person. And that tea she always sipped? It was whiskey—no matter how many times she swore it wasn’t. Every honey-dipped word her mother spoke, dripping with fake sweetness, was just bait—meant to attract trust like bees to nectar. But beneath that sweetness was a snake’s forked tongue, and behind the mask was the one person she should have been protected from all along. The hand that once beat her black and blue, reaching out. How dare she, how could her mother try now? How dare her mother have the nerve