I was ten years old when I found the old photo album in my mother’s closet. I’d been sneaking into her bedroom for weeks, trying on her vintage lace slips and elegant costume jewelry. My first impression of my mother, from when I was very young, was that she was strikingly lovely, and I wanted to be like her.

The photo album was tucked behind her shoes. I’d been trying to pull a pair of ivory Ferragamo pumps down from a high shelf when it toppled into my arms, almost knocking me over. I was small back then. I’d always been a bit smaller than my peers, and for years I would believe this was a bad thing, until my mother explained to me that small was good.

The smaller the better.

But in that moment, my smallness caused me to stumble against the closet wall, and the photo album sprang open, revealing a picture of a family. Everyone smiling. Everyone blond. But in the places where the parents’ eyes should’ve been, someone had taken a pair of scissors and hacked until no irises remained, no eyelids, no pale lashes brushing against cheeks.

I should’ve closed the album then, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat down beneath the satin and the lace, and I turned page after page. Those eyes were scratched out everywhere. My heart raced at the sight of them, and I couldn’t understand why my mother had done this to her own parents.

I wanted to ask her the minute she got home. It would take her a few minutes to close up her office, and half an hour to drive across town to our little apartment, which meant she’d walk through the door around a quarter to six. By the time she got home, I was waiting for her in the living room. The album in my lap. She took one look at it and yanked it from my hand, stomping toward the kitchen. With a flick of the wrist, she opened the garbage can and dropped it inside. Turned around. Wiped her hands on her white pantsuit.

“Shall we call in for dinner?”

“Who were those people?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. They were my grandparents. Her mom and dad.

“They’re nobody, baby. What do you feel like? Popcorn shrimp? How about tapas? We haven’t done tapas in—”

“Why did you scratch out their eyes?”

She came and sat next to me on the couch. We didn’t have money then, but she’d managed to scrounge up a decent living room set from a nearby thrift store. The sofa and love seat were the softest, cushiest white. The tables and chairs, as bleached as the bones of a whale. This was a home where shoes were taken off the second one walked through the door, and beds were made before breakfast. Cleanliness and godliness and all of that.

“I was angry when I did that,” my mother said simply, running her hand through my hair. She loved to toy with the pale blond strands. For years, we’d slept in the same bed every night, and she’d stroked my hair until I’d fallen asleep. Read me stories. Sang me songs. She was my favorite person in the world, and I was hers.

“Why were you angry at Grandma and Grandpa?” She tensed the second I said those words. Those names, which I’d rarely spoken. “Were they mean to you? To me?”

“They never met you.” Her hand caught on a tangle in my hair. “They never touched you, and they never will.”

“Not even for a hug?”

Her fingers tightened, tugging uncomfortably at my scalp. I slithered out of her grip. And I watched her, cautiously, breathlessly, as she strode over to the garbage can and pulled the album out.

She returned to my side.

“What have I told you about my family?” she asked, flipping through the album. Page after page sped by, revealing widely grinning smiles and impeccable clothing. Hands clasped. Eyes slashed.

“You lived in a beautiful mansion. You wore beautiful dresses, and your parents took you to lunches and dances and parties. But when you started sneaking out to meet Daddy, they got mad.”

“Your daddy was wild. Reckless. He loved putting poison in his veins, and my parents threatened to disown me if I kept seeing him.” She turned a page too quickly. The page tore, and her lips twitched up, as if the destruction pleased her. “I didn’t listen. I didn’t think they’d actually throw me out, but when I got pregnant with you at sixteen, they told me I’d made my choice. A few days later, I came home from school to find my dresses on the lawn. My shoes. My photo albums. They’d changed the locks to the house! I pounded on the door, sobbing, but my parents passed by the window like they couldn’t see me. I thought…” She slid her fingernail along the photograph, scratching at her mother’s eyes. “They didn’t deserve eyes if they wouldn’t look at their own daughter. I picked up a rock and threw it at the glass, hoping it would shatter. Hoping shards would make a home in their eyes. But the glass barely cracked, and nothing happened to them.”

“So you stabbed their pictures instead.”

She nodded, closing the album. “I stabbed their pictures, and I moved in with your daddy, and for a few years, I had a family. Until he left me too.”

I frowned, reaching up to touch her face. “You still have a family,” I promised. “You have me.”

She smiled, and then she went to the bathroom to fix her mascara. We ate tapas while sitting on the living room floor. We laughed and told stories about finding your true family, and it was one of the best nights of my life.

For the next few months, I was happy. My mother and I felt closer than ever. Sure, she was buried in loan debt, and she was struggling under the burden of raising me alone, but we had each other. It was us against the world, and nothing could touch us. Hurt us. Tear us apart.

Then my mother started seeing a man she knew from college, and we didn’t eat dinner together anymore. She got dressed to the nines, wearing her heels and her pearls, and she went out every night. She swore it was only temporary. The “honeymoon period,” where they wanted to see each other every second of every day. Soon, those fluttery feelings would settle into comfort, and she’d bring him to meet me. Then we could be a family.

But things didn’t go as planned. Two months into the relationship, my mother asked her new beau to come and see me, and he grew skittish. Distant. Based on snippets of phone conversations I overheard, he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of raising a ten-year-old child, and that wasn’t his fault.

She hadn’t told him about me.

Over the next couple of years, my mother dated six different men, each of whom disappeared at the mention of me. It didn’t matter if she told them on the first date or the twenty-first. Her adolescent daughter sent them running for the hills. She’d had me when she was sixteen, she insisted to them. She was still young, and they only had to be as involved in my life as they wanted to be. They didn’t have to be my father. They didn’t even have to be my friend. But no matter what spin she put on the story, the second they learned she had a daughter in middle school, they vanished.

Then, halfway through the seventh grade, she started dating Troy. She’d met him on some dating app or another, and he was a bright-eyed dental student with an easy smile. I watched through my bedroom curtains when he picked her up, and hurried to look out the window again when he brought her back home. He opened doors for her. He held his jacket over her head when it rained. He seemed nice! Maybe he would be the one!

Inevitably, it came time for me to meet him, and I could tell my mother was nervous about introducing us. He knew about me, but she’d talked about me so casually over the phone, I sounded more like an old sofa in the corner than a child. And maybe I wasn’t a child anymore. Men looked at me like I wasn’t. They held doors open for me, and though no one had covered me with a jacket when it rained, I thought it was only a matter of time, and so… I decided to introduce myself to Troy. I put on one of my mother’s smallest dresses, which almost fit me, if I belted it very tight. I curled my hair like she curled her own, and when he came to pick her up that night, I raced outside to meet him.

My mother was aghast. She gaped at me with a horrified look on her face, as if I’d hurled her over the side of a mountain, but she didn’t understand what I was doing. I wasn’t a little girl. The men she dated didn’t have to be scared of taking care of me, because I was just a smaller version of my mom, and I could take care of myself.

Troy looked at me.

I looked at him.

His face broke into a grin. “You must be Lily,” he said, holding out an arm and looping me into an embrace. “It’s so good to meet you. You look just like your mother, wow. When you told me…” He turned to my mom, shaking his head in wonder. “She’s so beautiful,” he said.

I beamed.

My mother cringed, but a blush was spreading across her cheeks. Troy wasn’t stumbling away. He wasn’t stammering excuses about getting up early in the morning or needing to focus on work or going through a selfish period in his life. He liked me. I liked him.

Our problems were solved.

For the next few months, Troy and my mother got closer, and we had movie nights together, eating popcorn and laughing through ridiculous comedies. We made elaborate dinners. We went for walks in the rose garden in the middle of town. I never really thought about the fact that they were taking me on all their dates, because it didn’t feel that way at first. It didn’t feel bad, or wrong.

Then one night, my mother went away to a conference one town away, and Troy showed up at our door with takeout from Paradise Gardens. My favorite. We sat on the living room floor and ate with our hands. At the end of the night, Troy led me to the bed that I shared with my mother and he tucked me in. He said it was very adult of me to stay home on my own without a babysitter, but maybe he should stay with me to make sure I was all right. And I said sure, because… it made sense. I was a thirteen-year-old in a bad part of town, and the locks on our door were questionable at best.

Nothing happened that night. Nothing I could put my finger on, because he fell asleep soon after, and so did I. I remember dozing off to the sound of him snoring. But I woke up the following morning to the sound of my mother’s screams. She dragged Troy out of the apartment and into the hallway. She all but pushed him down the rickety stairs to the building. Then she hurried back to me, sobbing and telling me she was sorry. I promised that nothing had happened. I told her he’d only wanted to stay with me, because I wasn’t old enough to stay home alone.

Over time, her sobs softened to rasping breaths. I cleaned the mascara from her eyes and made her some tea. She always liked drinking tea when she couldn’t calm down, the caffeine-free kind that slowed the heart rate instead of quickening it. “I will never let anyone hurt you,” she told me, over and over again, lifting her cup with a trembling hand. “I will never bring another man into our home.”

And for several months, she didn’t. It was the two of us against the world again. But my mother didn’t seem to enjoy being alone with her daughter anymore. She was lonely. I could see it. When she started dating a widower named Stefan Holloway, she came up with a way to keep me safe without sacrificing her own happiness.

She was going to hide me in plain sight.

“Some girls develop early,” she explained, pulling out the sweaters she wore when she was pregnant with me. The oversize jeans. The layers of T-shirts. “It isn’t your fault, but if we don’t cover you up, men might think inappropriate thoughts.”

“I’ll wear all the layers,” I announced, pulling on T-shirt after T-shirt. She giggled at the sight of me, like we were coconspirators. Spies, sneaking into the house of a king. It felt like a game. But after she married Stefan Holloway, and we moved onto the estate, my mother worried he might glimpse me changing after a shower. He might try to sneak into my room at night.

My bed.

And so, she suggested we monitor my meals. We were coconspirators again, plotting to keep Dr. Holloway from looking at me the way Troy had. Over the next few months, my curves withered like flowers drying in the sun. My ribs pressed against my skin. I looked more like a skeleton than a child, but even then, she jumped every time Dr. Holloway glanced at me. She jumped every time he glanced at Raven, who had his mother’s eyes and his mother’s laugh.

I started to worry that she wasn’t protecting me at all. She was protecting herself. She’d lost her parents because of me. My father. Troy. When Raven started hearing his dead mom’s voice in the middle of the night, I realized how far she would go to keep Dr. Holloway’s attention. She’d torture Raven. She’d starve her own daughter. She’d kill us both, and pretend it had been an accident.

Unless I killed her first.

I hadn’t even acknowledged how angry I was until I found Belle’s recipe in the orchard. I’d been hurting for so long, and I’d been afraid to admit it. I blackmailed my way into the murder plot. Then Jack went behind my back and told the police Raven was in danger, and instead of getting my mother away from him, they sent him to a boarding school where he would be safe. I was left alone with the woman who’d been tormenting us both.

And I knew what would happen next.

One night, three months after Raven went away to boarding school, my mother laid out my nightly salad, and I just… refused to eat it. I wanted her to see what she was doing to me. I knew, by then, that I would never be small enough to make her feel safe around me. I would shrink and shrink until I disappeared entirely.

I wouldn’t let her do that to me.

I pushed my chair back from the table with a screech. I looked into her eyes as if to say: Choose your daughter. Choose me. Her jaw hardened and she grabbed me by the arm, pulling me out to the orchard where we could speak in private. “You’re being reckless,” she hissed at me. “Everything I’ve done over the past year, I’ve done for you. If you had any idea what it took to get into this house—”

“You didn’t do it for me! You did it for yourself!” I was crying, hunched over between the trees. I caught sight of Dr. Holloway’s pruning shears in the dirt, and I thought of bringing them to my throat, showing her where all of this led. “You’re going to kill me.”

“I would never hurt you.” A shadow crossed her face, her fingers still encircling my arm.

“You hurt Raven. You hated him because he had his mother’s eyes, and every time Stefan looked at him—”

“Baby, you’re delirious. You need to eat. Why don’t we take a look at your diet plan, and see if we can’t add—”

“I’m not eating until you listen to me!” I jerked out of her grip, landing in a pile of leaves. The pruning shears glistened at me from the dirt. They winked at me, as if sharing a dirty secret.

An ugly secret.

I lifted the shears to my hair. “You say you want to keep me safe, but that isn’t what you’re doing.” One chunk of hair fell away, then another. My beautiful blond locks, decimated like the eyes in her photo album. Hacked. Slashed. “You want to hide my beauty so Stefan won’t want me. You want to make me ugly.”

Moment by moment, strand by strand, I took my beauty away. I left it lying in the dirt. That’s how Dr. Holloway found me. Crouched over in the orchard, a pile of discarded locks at my feet. Bone thin and shivering in the wind. When my mother said, “She’s refusing to eat,” he didn’t ask for an explanation.

He simply sent me away, just like he had with Raven.

For the next few months, I lived in the Rose Hollow Wellness Facility, eating and sleeping to my heart’s content. I learned that I didn’t have to hate my beauty. I didn’t have to cower in the dark. Hidden away from my mother’s clutches, I was able to do all the things she’d never let me do:

Play. Relax. Care about myself.

I reconnected with my birth father and learned the truth of my past. He had left me as a baby, but only to protect me from the addiction that had ripped through his life like a tornado. He’d spent years getting clean. More years trying to find his way back to me. Only one thing stood in the way of us finally being a family, and if we could eliminate that obstacle, we could be together.

And so, last Saturday night, I snuck over to Belladonna’s yard, where I wrapped my hand around a clump of flowers. I quietly liberated them from the dirt Then I went to see my mother.