“Christopher,” I said, still calm. “I’m not an ATM. You made business decisions. Live with them. I’m not going to fund your watch habit.”
His face flushed. “You think you’re better than us because you play with robots?”
“I never said—”
“We show up for mom,” Amanda cut in suddenly, eyes flashing. “We take her to events. We help her with socials. We’re there. You never are. And the one time you show up, you start drama.”
Drama.
Me saying no to a fifty-thousand-dollar “bridge loan” was drama.
For decades, my role had been simple: the weird kid, the disappointment, the punchline. It made them feel better about their own chaos. “At least we’re not Emma.” It gave them a scapegoat when their own choices caught up with them.
And now, suddenly, I had dared to also be an uncooperative scapegoat.
Angela reached for the coffee pot.
The rest, you know.
The tilt. The heat. The laughter.
The way she snarled, “That’s how we treat trash.”
So when I sat in my Subaru, fingers trembling around the steering wheel, playing back her words and the way the coffee had scorched a line along my neck, the decision felt less like something I consciously made and more like a lever I pulled.
Enough.
If they wanted to turn me into content, fine.
But they were about to discover what happens when the algorithm finds the whole story.
I turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed, then caught. The familiar rattle settled into a steady hum.
The drive to urgent care took twenty minutes.
My brain tumbled the entire way.
One part of me—the small, childlike part that still craved a soft place to land—wanted to turn off the highway, find a quiet side street, park, and cry until the windows fogged. To ask the universe what was so fundamentally unlovable about me that my mother would rather burn me than accept a boundary.
Another part, the older, sharper part—the CEO part—started assembling facts.
Angela had poured near-boiling liquid over my head in a public place.
There were witnesses.
There was video.
My scalp burned in sharp pulses as another thought slid into place like a puzzle piece: I could press charges.
I had watched my mother skate past consequences my entire life. Parking tickets, social faux pas, debts, rude comments—everything dissolved under a combination of charm, manipulation, and money she did not really have.
This time, there was a record.
This time, the money was mine.
The urgent care waiting room was half full when I walked in: a little girl clutching her arm, a teenager with a bloody nose, an older man hacking into a tissue. Heads turned as I approached the front desk, hood down, hair still damp, neck a patchwork of drying coffee and raw pink skin.
The receptionist blinked. “Can I… help you?”
“I got hot coffee poured on me,” I said. Saying it out loud made it both more real and more surreal. “My scalp and neck are burned.”
Her eyes widened as she took in the damage. “Sit down,” she said quickly, reaching for the phone. “We’ll get you seen right away.”
A nurse ushered me back within minutes. The doctor who followed had the efficient, kind manner of someone who’d seen everything and knew most people weren’t prepared for what they put their bodies through.
He parted my hair gently, inspecting the worst spots, clucking occasionally. “Second-degree in a few places,” he murmured. “Nothing that’s going to need grafts, thankfully, but this will hurt like hell for a while. Any dizziness? Vision issues?”
“Just pissed off,” I said.
That won me a small smile.
He sprayed a cool, hissing solution along my scalp. The relief was instant and almost obscene, like stepping into shade after standing in desert sun.
“Do you want to tell me how it happened?” he asked as he worked. “So I know what boxes to check.”
“My mother poured a pot of coffee on my head at brunch,” I said flatly.
His hands paused for barely a fraction of a second. Professionalism reasserted itself almost immediately.
“On purpose?”
“Yes.”
“Any loss of consciousness?”
“No.”
“Any history of—”
“Of her being awful?” I supplied. “Yes. But nothing physically like this. Yet.”
He glanced at me, something like sympathy in his eyes. “I’ll be documenting this in your chart as an assault,” he said carefully. “That means if you choose to involve law enforcement, there will be medical records supporting your account. I’m also going to suggest you take pictures before you go home. Or I can have someone here take them, if you’d like.”
The word “assault” hung in the air between us.
I let it settle.
So much of my life had been about minimizing, about rationalizing. She’s just stressed. They don’t mean it. It’s not that bad. Other people have it worse.
Assault didn’t leave much room for excuses.
“Take the pictures,” I said after a beat. “Please.”
We did.
Flash after flash, my coffee-streaked hair and peeling skin captured from every angle. The nurse’s face looked pinched as she clicked.
Evidence.
For what, exactly, I wasn’t sure yet.
But I knew my family had just crossed a line. And once my lines are crossed, there is no going back.
Bandaged and medicated, burn spray and painkillers in a little white paper bag, I drove home.
Home.
Not the too-perfect limestone Angela loved to show off, not the neighborhood where all the houses looked the same height and all the cars were variations on the same three brands.
Home was a small cabin an hour outside the city, perched on a hill overlooking a valley. I’d bought it years ago, back when SafeMind was just a shared repo and a shared dream among three sleep-deprived weirdos in a co-working space.
The cabin had ugly linoleum in the kitchen and a wood stove that needed coaxing in winter. The stairs creaked, and the pipes banged sometimes when the shower warmed up.
It was mine.
The land it sat on was mine.
The code I wrote there changed the world, even if the world didn’t know it yet.
Pixel bounded to the door as I stepped inside, black tail wagging furiously. He stopped short when he caught the smell of antiseptic and coffee, nose wrinkling.
“It’s okay,” I murmured, scratching behind his ears with careful fingers. “I’m okay.”
He didn’t believe me, but he leaned into my leg anyway.
The cabin was quiet. Snow had started to fall heavier while I was gone, blanketing the trees in soft white. The only sounds were the low whirr of the refrigerator and Pixel’s nails clicking on the hardwood.
In the bathroom, I set the pharmacy bag on the counter, peeled off my hoodie—wincing as bits of fabric stuck momentarily to tender skin—and took a good, long look at myself again.
The blister behind my left ear was angrier now, swollen and taut. My hair clung in sticky strands; my neck was a mess of raw pink and red.
I didn’t cover it.
I wanted to see it.
I wanted to remember, in vivid detail, what my family did when I dared to say no.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
Then again.
Then again.
A steady, vibrating hum, insistent and unbroken, like a trapped hornet.
For a second, I let it buzz.
Apologies, I thought. Maybe. Explanations. “You know we didn’t mean it,” followed by some mental gymnastics where it was somehow my fault for provoking her.
I picked it up.
It wasn’t Angela.
It wasn’t Christopher or Amanda.
It was TikTok.
A notification from an old account I’d set up years ago and promptly forgotten.
Someone had tagged me in a video.
My stomach dropped as I tapped the screen.
