MIA'S POV
"Mom, please, let me explain."
"Explain what, Mia?" My mother's voice is quiet, which is somehow so much worse than if she were shouting. "Explain how long this has been happening? Explain why I had to hear it standing in a hospital corridor instead of from you?"
"It has not been long," I say, and my voice sounds small and useless even to my own ears. "A week. Not even that."
"A week." She laughs, but there is nothing amused in it, just something brittle and close to breaking. "We have lived in that house a week, Mia, and somehow in that time you managed to fall into something with your own stepbrother, something serious enough that you were just out here making plans about how to tell me. Do you understand what that looks like from where I am standing?"
Beside me, Ryan shif
