“That’s good,” Dad nods, and I nod back at him. “And your mom is meeting you at the airport to drive you to school?”

“She offered, but I told her I was fine just to go straight to Kingsacre.”

“Oh honey, I don’t want you moving in to your college dorm alone, let me book a flight and I’ll come with you and help you settle in.”

“It’s fine, Dad, I promise. You can’t take time off the boat at this time of year and I can carry my own shit, I’m only taking one case with me anyway.”

“I’m worried about you, honey,” he says solemnly. “Remember there’s an open-ended return ticket in your name saved on the airline account, all you have to do is pick a flight and you can come on home whenever you need to. You don’t need to wait for the holidays, you can just come home, because this is your home and it always will be.”

Tears fill my eyes and I launch myself at my dad, throwing my arms around his neck and clinging to him. “I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you too, honey.”

In the years I’ve been living in Maine, my dad has become my rock. He never once doubted my feelings or actions, his belief in me is unyielding, and that means more to me than he could ever understand. Living here has been great. We moved to a cute two-bedroom apartment overlooking the harbor about six months after I decided I was staying, and I spent the remainder of my high school years at the local public school.

The kids here are nice, and for the first few months I tried to make friends, but when the girls I started to get close to suddenly got friend requests from The Elite, and expensive gifts through the post, I gave up. The fear that Sebastian would swoop in and take away any friendships I made kept me from forming any real bonds with anyone. In the grand scale of things, the short time I spent as Sebastian’s unwilling girlfriend shouldn’t have impacted me as much as it has. But he fundamentally changed me, shattered my trust in the people who were closest to me and morphed me into the closed-off, emotional cacti that I am now.

The only important person in my life is my dad, because despite Sebastian’s best attempts, whenever he turned up to lure me back to Green Acres, he could never influence my salt-of-the-earth working-class fisherman father.

It may sound lonely to never make friends or have a boyfriend at my age, but I’d rather be alone than have to watch my family or friends abandon me in favor of a pretty rich boy with a winning smile and a golden tongue. What hurts the most is that he didn’t even have to try that hard to steal Mom or Court from me. Mom switched from team Starling, to team Sebastian the moment she stepped into his family’s massive house, and Court was gone with a hint at the popularity I had no idea she was coveting so hard. I’d rather be alone than constantly worry that the people around me are just waiting to betray me.