ISABELLA
The car had barely left Gràcia when the idea hit me like a reckless impulse I couldn’t ignore.
I was tired of feeling like a ghost in my own life. Tired of the baggy clothes at work, tired of hiding, tired of being “Ugly Betty” even when I was trying to step out of that shell. If I was going to survive this twisted new reality with Rafael, maybe I needed to stop hiding so much.
I cleared my throat from the backseat.
“Marco… can we make a stop? I want to go to a hair salon. Somewhere nice.”
The silence that followed was deafening. Marco’s hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel, but his face remained completely blank in the rearview mirror, like a man who had already calculated how annoying I was and decided it wasn’t worth the energy.
“No,” he said flatly.
I blinked
