Sunflower Girl

Chapter Three: The Crack Beneath the Crown

The Ashford house looked like something out of a magazine — white columns, a circular driveway, a chandelier in the foyer that threw little rainbows on the marble when the sun hit it right.

Kayla used to think that was proof of something.

That beautiful houses meant beautiful lives.She'd stopped believing that around the same time she'd stopped believing in a lot of things.Her father, Richard Ashford, ran a hedge fund and had opinions about everything except how his daughter was actually doing. Her mother, Diane, had once been a corporate attorney and was now mostly a woman who reorganized closets and took long baths and didn't ask questions she didn't want the answers to. They loved Kayla. She believed that, mostly. But love in the Ashford house came filtered through achievement, through appearances, through the particular silence that fell over dinner whenever anyone got too close to something true.

That Thursday night, the silence broke."You're seeing him again," her father said, not looking up from his plate.

Not a question."Richard—" her mother started.

"Don't." He set down his fork with the kind of precision that meant he was one wrong word from losing it. "I saw the charge. The hotel in the city. Was I supposed to pretend I didn't see it?"Kayla sat very still, fork halfway to her mouth, watching her parents' marriage crack open at the dinner table like it did most weeks now, just with different words each time."This is not a conversation for tonight," Diane said, glancing at Kayla like that might stop it.It didn't. It never did.

They fought for twenty more minutes. Kayla excused herself after five, carrying her plate to the kitchen, scraping food she hadn't tasted into the trash. She could still hear them from the stairs — her father's voice sharp and controlled, her mother's cracking in that way that meant she was one sentence from crying and refusing to.In her room, Kayla sat on the floor of her closet, which was maybe pathetic for a seventeen-year-old, but it was the only space in the house that felt like it belonged only to her. She pulled her knees to her chest and did what she always did. She thought about the one thing that was still hers.Top of the class. Valedictorian by spring. A name people said with respect instead of pity.Except now there were two names on that list, and one of them wasn't hers anymore.She opened her phone. Scrolled through Sienna's i********: — barely used, a handful of posts, a girl with her mom at a lake somewhere, a girl laughing at something off camera, a girl who looked, infuriatingly, like she had nothing to prove to anyone.*Must be nice,* Kayla thought, and hated herself a little for thinking it, and thought it anyway. *Must be nice to just show up somewhere and take what isn't yours.*She texted Bree. *she's not even trying that hard. it's like she doesn't even care about being first, she just IS first. do you know how annoying that is*Bree wrote back in seconds. *ur still #1 at everything that matters. who cares about lit grades**I care,* Kayla typed, then deleted it. Too honest. Too much like admitting that a four-point gap on an essay had cracked something she'd spent years reinforcing.Instead she wrote: *whatever.

it's fine.

It wasn't fine.

Nothing in that house was fine, and it hadn't been for a long time, and the only thing Kayla had ever found that dulled the noise of it — being the best, being wanted, being seen — had just gotten a little more complicated.She didn't have a plan yet. Not really. Just a low simmering resentment with nowhere to go, and a family falling apart one dinner at a time, and a body that had learned a long time ago that pain needed an exit, needed a target, needed somewhere to land that wasn't her own chest.

She just didn't know yet that the target had already picked itself.