Jule's POV
The thing people never understood about being likable was that it wasn't a personality trait. It was a discipline.
Jules had known this since she was nine years old, sitting in a new cafeteria in a new town for the third time in four years, watching the way a room recalibrated itself around a person who smiled first. It wasn't about being nice. Nice was passive, something that happened to you. Likable was something you built, brick by brick, expression by expression, until people stopped noticing the architecture and just felt at home inside it.
She was good at it. She'd always been good at it. It was the one thing that traveled with her no matter how many times her mother's job moved them, the one constant across four schools and three states Jules walked into a room, and wi
