When I finally opened it, there it was: a video. Nadia’s giggle. Xander’s low laugh. The shaky image of them tangled together in his hotel suite. Again. The fiftieth video she’d sent me — always labeled Oops, sorry, wrong send. Always just enough to remind me who I really was in their eyes.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t break the phone. I didn’t even bother to watch it all the way through. I just tossed it into my bag, finished taping gauze over the IV mark, and zipped up my small suitcase.
I was done.
As I waited for the nurse to finish the discharge papers, my mind drifted to the first time everything really started to fall apart — long before Xander, long before the yacht.
I was fifteen when my mother shattered my world. She’d been cheating on my father with Nadia’s father for years — I’d always heard the late-night calls, the slammed doors, the crying. When the divorce papers came, I thought I’d stay with Dad. But Mom forced me to come with her. “A daughter belongs with her mother,” she said.
That was the first time I felt truly unwanted.