The mistake, Daniella knew, was a major one. She didn’t need to be told that. She knew. She’d known since she found out. What she needed to do now, though, was stall for time. She needed for Eli to flee the premises and maybe drive out past the state line. “Look, I have a plan.”

“No, you don’t have a plan. You cannot possibly have a plan because you don’t even understand the gravity of what you’ve done. You don’t get what nine thousand dollars would do to a place like this. And if you don’t explain what happened in ten seconds, you don’t have a job anymore.”

Daniella’s throat went dry. She was not a snitch. No one talks, and we all walk. That motto had seen her—and her siblings—out of many, many a tight spot.

But she could tell that Jo was serious. That Jo wasn’t messing around anymore. Jo was forgiving. But lying and covering up that lie with more lies was not within the boundaries of what Jo would ever forgive. To Jo, lies were the line. The point of no return.

Lies were how Daniella had survived this long in this world. She had lies for getting out of church on Sundays and lies for staying out late on Saturdays. Lies she told her family—that they were fine, that she was fine, that everything was fine. She had little lies—the kind she told to friends about how she felt about math or science—that added up to enormous lies, like the entire persona she had built in order to socially float her way through high school.

Perhaps these lies had made Daniella overly flexible with the truth, made her moral compass point somewhere other than true north. After all, what was a lie to a girl who pretended to be a poet on one corner of the internet all while she took videos of herself vaping on the other end just to be cool enough not to shake up the social hierarchy?

But lies had also given her a hard shell. And ability to withstand the worst of people. Somebody had to protect the bookstore. Somebody had to make the hard calls. Somebody had to be willing to do what it took in order to save all their asses. And Daniella—with her lies and her moral gymnastics—she had the heart of steel necessary to protect her and her own.

So maybe it was a good thing that she didn’t have AJ’s pesky moral compass to get in the way. Because the bookstore was not going under. Eli was not going to jail. Jo was not taking the fall. Daniella was going to figure all of this out. She had to.

Ice in your veins. A heart of steel. If you sink, you sink on your own terms.