# THOMPSON-HAYES: BLOOD MONEY
## Chapter One — The Blocked Number
The confetti was still falling when her phone rang.
White and gold, catching the gymnasium lights the way snow catches headlights — slowly, deliberately, like it had nowhere better to be. A hundred and twelve people were applauding. Nathan's hand was warm in hers. Sarah was somewhere in the third row doing the cry-and-deny thing she had been doing since September.
Mia was smiling. A real smile, the unguarded kind she had stopped managing sometime in November and had not started again. She was standing at the front of a room full of people who had chosen to be there, under a banner with her name on it, in a school gymnasium that smelled like floor wax and possibility.
Her phone vibrated.
She almost let it go. Almost.
B
