Rocking forward and back wasn’t helping. The tapping, tapping, tapping on her chest wasn’t helping. If Daniella could just get a deep breath in, everything would be okay. She would be okay. Nothing had happened and she was lucky and if she could just draw in a breath, that would help. Daniella knew it would help. “I’m fine.”

“You’re shaking back and forth and doing this weird tapping thing on your chest. I’d say that is decidedly not fine. Like if you were an old dude, I’d be worried you were having a heart attack or something.”

“Oh, would you?” Daniella stood, rage flaring. She stopped rocking; she stopped tapping. She made herself as large and imposing as she ever knew how to make herself. “What about now?”

But Rinn was still looking at Daniella like she was convinced that Daniella could not possibly be okay. And when Rinn had an idea, nothing could stop her, come hell or high water—that much had always been apparent about Rinn Olivera.

And then Rinn opened her mouth and proved all of Daniella’s suspicions right. “You’re not okay. There’s no way you could be. I saw him. I mean, not all of it. But I saw you afterward, and I saw him. I know what happened.”

“Oh, and you know everything about everything, don’t you?” Daniella inched closer, she shoved her face directly into Rinn’s.

“Take a deep breath. Deep breath in, deep breath out.” Rinn said it in such a practiced, methodical way. Like she really had talked another person out of this before with a little bit of can-do and a sunny disposition.

It made Daniella want to scream into a void. It made her want to curl up into a ball inside of herself and become as small and invisible as possible. “Just let me ask you something, Rinn Olivera—do you, I mean, is there anything you aren’t an expert on by reading a fucking book about it?”

Rinn took a step back. She was not expecting the person she helped to fight her, clearly. “I’m not just an expert from books.”

But Daniella had more fight in her still. She had hours, days, months, years of fight in her. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t breathe. It didn’t matter that she wished she was small and invisible. She was clearly being seen, and she would do anything, anything to get out from the microscopic gaze of Rinn Fucking Olivera. “Articles, too? How delightful. Is there any time in your measurably perfect life that you have learned by actually experiencing it? Or are you the world’s greatest living expert on secondhand knowledge?”

Rinn swallowed hard. She opened her mouth. Then she closed it. But then, she seemed to come to another decision and said, “You’re a bitch.”

That’s when Daniella’s hand went flying.