Stella:
The night before the fundraiser was an endless stretch of suffocating silence, punctuated only by the restless rustling of my sheets and the quiet hum of my thoughts—thoughts that refused to settle, no matter how hard I tried to push them away.
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, the glow of my phone screen illuminating the room in soft, artificial light. Evelyn had told me to avoid the internet. She had said it with the kind of firmness that came from knowing me too well, from understanding that I had a bad habit of seeking out the worst just to confirm it was as bad as I feared.
But I couldn’t stop myself.
With a slow, hesitant breath, I unlocked my phone and opened i********:.
The headline had spread like wildfire, bleeding into every corner of social media. The people wh
