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“Punished in what way?” I ask.

“They’ll send me away from my family,” he says. “They might even make me go to the Michigan community.”

He really doesn’t understand how crazy this is. He thinks being sent to Michigan is a worse fate than being raped and forced into marriage. I'm not sure I can reason with someone so misguided. If anything, my attempts at reason would probably backfire.

“I mean, does it matter?” he asks. “You've done it before.”

Does it matter? Jesus.

And then my heart beats harder. There are a few ways this can go: Tommy does what they told him to do, someone else—Joshua, perhaps—does it in his place.

Or…

“I’ll marry you,” I announce, my voice intentionally flat.

I oversold my cooperation before. It's vital that he believes I'm simply giving up.

I'm not, but I also know that the odds of Kappy blackmailing someone into bringing me home are slim, and slimmer still are my odds of getting a passport and getting out of here on my own.

He stares, wide-eyed. “You will? But we haven’t⁠—”

“You're a good man, Tommy,” I whisper, covering his hand with mine. “I don't want to be here anymore, and I think you don't either. If you're willing to accept me, even though, you know, I'm ruined. I guess I don't see myself getting this lucky a second time, and I don't want to turn into Mrs. Humboldt.”

I worry that I've overplayed it. Why would he believe me when I've been trying for a week to send a letter to Kappy?

Because he’s been trained since birth, just like I was, to believe we don’t really have a better option.

He squeezes my hand. “I can forgive you for what you've done, Grace, as long as you can forgive yourself.”

I let my head rest on his shoulder. “I'll do my best.”

He's just given me my ticket home.

32

Iconvince him to leave and let me sleep. He presses his lips to my forehead before he goes. The moment he exits, I wipe the traces of that kiss away with the back of my hand.

I should sleep. I'll need it to get through tomorrow and to play this game correctly. But my mind won’t stop racing. Too much has been made clear by what just occurred.

Any lingering doubt I had about my father's guilt—with Leila, with Kelly Maguire—has been wiped away. A man who'd suggest the things my father did to Tommy couldn't care about consent.

And the things Mrs. Humboldt said, her crazy ramblings...I bet every one of them was true. My beautiful mother was forced into her marriage—perhaps because she thought she was ruined, and it was the only way to handle it. Would she have been okay with me suffering the same fate? I doubt it, but I really just don't know anymore. She let them bring me here. She tried her best to get me to win Tommy over when he visited. I just don't know.

I’m not even sure that going back to Florida is the correct solution. I want to leave Bright Covenant for good—but without losing my mom and my sisters. If Faith’s adoption wasn’t legal, I might be able to blackmail my parents into continuing the relationship, but what am I going to do about my dad? He can't just be allowed to remain headmaster at a school full of vulnerable, underage females. He can't. But if I go to the police and tell them that my father instructed Tommy to rape me, my father would deny it, and it'd probably be Tommy who'd be punished, if anyone. Kelly Maguire has already decided not to press charges, and I'm assuming Leila did the same. For all I know, Bright Covenant has police officers and judges in their pocket—ones who make every accusation disappear.

And the odds are that they'll be monitoring me. I'll have people I can run to there, unless I’m being watched so closely that I can't do that either.

Then, it seems, I'd end up married to Tommy.

Tommy's shoulders settle when I walk into the cafeteria in the morning. We grab food and sit at one of the long tables.

“How did you sleep?” he asks politely.

This is what marriage to him would be like: a constant, polite pretense. He was trying to pull my shorts down six hours ago, and the first words out of his mouth are this solicitous inquiry about my night's rest.

A lovely fiancé, unless a group of older men tells him not to be.

“I didn't sleep much, to be honest,” I tell him. I think that's the key here—to stick as close to the truth as I can. “There was a lot to process.”