The news, when I finally forced myself to check it at six in the morning, wasn't the disaster I had feared all night.
A single blurry photo of Lily leaving her dormitory, a caption calling her "the mysterious Vance sister" with a few cruel guesses about her love life. Ugly, invasive, embarrassing. But not the ruin I had braced for after that text message. I called her immediately, and she answered sounding more annoyed than afraid, more worried about a professor seeing the photo than anything Julian could actually do to her.
"People have called me worse things than mysterious," she said dryly. "I'm fine, Elara. Stop worrying so much, you're going to give yourself gray hair before you turn twenty six."
I let myself breathe for the first time in what felt like days.
"I still want the gua
