Olivia Bennett had learned the hard way that life didn’t hand people like her easy victories. At twenty-one, she was already carrying more weight on her shoulders than most people twice her age. Her parents had died when she was a teenager, leaving her with no financial safety net, no soft place to land. She lived in a cramped rented apartment with peeling wallpaper, a leaky faucet, and neighbors who blasted music at two in the morning.
Her scholarship was her lifeline, the single thread holding her future together but that thread was starting to fray. Her grades had been slipping, especially in mathematics, the one subject that refused to make sense no matter how hard she tried. Numbers blurred on the page, equations tangled into meaningless strings and every failed test, every red-marke
