Chapter 3

The next day, I went to my part-time job as a dishwasher at the restaurant on time.

From ten in the morning to eight at night.

The scorching summer heat turned the kitchen into a massive furnace.

Sweat dripped down my forehead and into my eyes, stinging them so badly I could barely keep them open.

After exams, in order to go on a graduation trip with Holden, I had been desperately working part-time to save money.

When I had applied to be a server, the manager had looked me up and down with disgust.

"You have a good figure, but with a scar that long on your face, how can you be a server? What if you scare the customers? You'd better just go to the back kitchen and wash dishes."

I swallowed the humiliation that came from all those strange looks. Even when my hands were soaked until they were pale and wrinkled, I didn't dare stop.

But now, I had already canceled my travel plans with Holden.

Didn't I finally have the right to get some good rest?

On my way to find the manager to resign, a food runner suddenly looked distressed and asked me to serve a dish for him.

Before I could even refuse, he clutched his stomach and rushed into the restroom.

When I pushed open the door to the private dining room at the back of the restaurant, the two people inside froze.

Holden was the first to react. He grabbed my arm and pulled me outside. "Lucia, what are you doing here?"

During the struggle, the boiling hot soup spilled onto my hand, instantly turning a large patch of my skin red.

Enduring the burning pain, I steadily placed the soup on the prep station nearby.

Seeing that I didn't speak, Holden grew even more anxious.

"Did you find out Bianca bombed the SAT, so you came here specifically to laugh at her?"

I looked up at him. Maybe my hand was burning so badly that tears instantly pooled in my eyes.

"In your heart, is that the kind of person I am?"

He froze for a second, then irritably wiped away my tears with his thumb. "Then why are you here?"

"Alright, stop crying. Bianca only scored a 960 on the SAT. She's already upset enough as it is."

"Her parents brought her out for a meal to cheer her up. Just don't show up in front of her and ruin her mood."

Saying that, he pulled a cheaply packaged white box from his pocket and handed it to me.

"For you. A graduation gift."

My shattered heart suddenly sparked with a trace of expectation.

I carefully tore open the packaging.

What my fingertips brushed against was a cheap-feeling fountain pen that couldn't have cost more than fifteen dollars.

The next second, Bianca came skipping over to Holden.

There wasn't a hint of sadness on her face about bombing the test.

Clutching tickets to a popular singer's concert in her hand, she affectionately linked her arm through Holden's.

"Holden, thank you! His concert tickets are so hard to get! I used to wait the exact moment they went on sale, and I still missed out so many times!"

I gripped that cheap fountain pen. That tiny bit of expectation I had just mustered up was completely extinguished.

I turned around, wanting to push the door open and leave.

But Holden quickly chased after me again.

"Lucia, don't overthink this. I just conveniently helped her grab a ticket."

Conveniently?

But Bianca had just said how hard it was to get that singer's tickets.

He was lying to me now, not even caring if his logic made sense.

"By the way, did we decide on the destination for our graduation trip? If we did, I'll go book the flights."

I looked at him in disbelief.

So, he had never even opened the travel itinerary I had stayed up for several nights to put together.

An indescribable exhaustion instantly swept through my entire body.

I lowered my head, tears swirling in my eyes. "Holden, about our graduation trip..."

Before I could get the word "cancel" out of my mouth.

Bianca suddenly stepped close to me, using a voice only the two of us could hear. "Lucia, does this necklace look good?"

"If Dad hadn't told me you had a habit of saving money, I really wouldn't have guessed that the little piggy bank hidden in your closet could hold so much cash."

I looked up in shock, my eyes locking dead onto the pearl necklace around her neck.

Every single pearl was round, full, and had an excellent luster. It obviously wasn't cheap.

"This pearl was one thousand eight hundred, and with this chain, it came out to exactly two thousand three hundred... Ah!"

I couldn't control myself. I raised my hand and landed a swift, vicious slap on Bianca's smug face.

She fell to the floor clutching her face, her pretty eyes wide with sheer disbelief.

"You dare hit me? What gives you the right to hit me!"

My eyes were burning with fire. I stared fixedly at Holden, shaking with anger.

Holden knew about it.

The money in that piggy bank was what I had been saving for a long time, planning to use it to repair the scar on my face after graduation.

"You brought her into my house? You're the only one who knows the code to my door!"

"What gives you the right to bring her into my house! That is my house!"

Holden frowned and denied it. "I didn't."

The door to the private room was pushed open again, and Priscilla's distressed scream exploded in my ears. "Bianca! What happened to you!"

The next second, a swift, vicious slap landed on my face.

Bianca's dad looked down at me from above. The disgust in his eyes was exactly the same as it had been that night thirteen years ago, when he abandoned me.

"And to think I actually went to your house this morning to pick you up, wanting to take you out for a meal together. It seems my good intentions were completely wasted!"

"Your sister just used a little bit of your money. Did you really have to hit her? It's only two thousand three hundred dollars! That's not even enough for Bianca to buy a bag!"

Even knowing perfectly well that this biological father standing before me didn't care about me at all...

...when he said those words, I still felt a subconscious wave of sorrow.

My heart felt like it was being pierced by thousands of needles, hurting so much I couldn't breathe.

This farce finally ended with the restaurant owner repeatedly apologizing to them.

After everyone left, red-faced with anger, the boss pointed at me and cursed me out for half an hour.

My pay for the past two weeks had always been settled in cash. The boss simply docked all of it, claiming it was to compensate Bianca's family.

When I said I was going to sue him, he sneered and told me he would call the police and sue me for assault, telling me to handle it however I saw fit.

I was shoved out of the restaurant by the boss.

Just then, a flight departure reminder popped up on my phone.

I wiped my tears, used the remaining forty dollars in my Venmo to call a car, and headed to the airport.

There was no one left here worth my love.

Now, I was going to find my own light.