“Why am I even making a damn pie?” She wasn’t going. She didn’t know how to socialize. For all intents and purposes, high school sleepovers were her last real social experience, and she was quite certain none of that etiquette applied to a casual backyard barbecue. Though she couldn’t help but wonder what Aldo Moretta’s reaction would be if she hit him with a pillow.

She was definitely not going. The man left her tongue-tied, shy, and painfully nervous. The absolute last thing she needed right now was a crush on a man like that. Aldo’s personality was as big as his barrel-like chest. Next to him, she’d fade away as she had with Glenn.

And she was good and tired of fading.

She draped the crust over the pie plate and spooned the filling into it, ignoring the way her hands shook.

The dream last night was still with her. Glenn, bursting into her room, murder in his eyes. He’d kill her in her mother’s house. She knew it even when she’d woken up, sobbing and covering her face.

Too many times it hadn’t been a dream. The abuse—and worse, the fear—was engraved in her bones, woven into her DNA. She was a different person from the teenager Glenn Diller had claimed as his own.

Where was the girl who shoved Bobby Leinhart off of Jamal Ngyuen on the playground? The girl who’d argued with her English teacher for a full letter grade higher on her To Kill a Mockingbird essay? The girl who’d laughed and awkwardly flirted and sang?

Was she still in there? Or was she already dead?

In her head, she could still hear Glenn’s hateful laugh.

She grabbed the wooden spoon out of the bowl and hurled it across the room. “Get out of my head!”

* * *

“I’m in love with your hair,” Harper announced, opening the door before Gloria made it to the top step of the porch.

Self-consciously she patted it with her free hand. “Really?” She’d taken her time with the styling and with her makeup, and when she looked in the mirror, it wasn’t the old Gloria she saw or the teenage, pre-Glenn Gloria. It was someone new.

“You look amazing,” Harper insisted.

“Thanks,” Gloria said, unaccustomed to compliments. “You look great, too.” It was the truth. There was an energy, bright and vivacious, that bubbled out of Harper even more so tonight than before. Gloria wondered if it was because Luke was home.

She followed her new friend inside and paused inside the door.

“Wait. Am I hallucinating?” she asked Harper, handing over the pie. Luke’s living room and dining room were full of actual furniture.