The Starlight Motel sat on the edge of Cedarwood like a rotting tooth.
Crysta stood at the front desk. The manager, a man with grease in his hair and nicotine stains on his fingers, stared at her gray sweat suit.
She placed the cash the woman in the truck had given her on the scratched laminate counter. Combined with her own money, she paid for two nights.
The manager slid a brass key across the desk.
Room 114 smelled of old smoke and damp carpet. The bedspread had cigarette burns near the pillows. Crysta closed the door. She turned the deadbolt. She engaged the chain lock.
She stood in the center of the room and stared at the locked door. Her chest heaved. Oxygen rushed into her lungs so fast it made her dizzy. A door that locked from the inside. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
She walked to the nightstand and set down the manila envelope. It landed with a dull thud. That envelope was her entire existence.
Her muscles ached. A deep, bone-crushing exhaustion pulled at her limbs. But her brain was wired. Adrenaline pumped through her veins. If she closed her eyes, she would wake up to the sound of guards hitting the metal bars with their batons.
She walked into the bathroom. The tiles were cracked. She turned the shower handle all the way to the left.
She stripped off the gray clothes. She stepped under the water.
It was scalding hot. The heat hit her skin like a physical blow, turning her shoulders bright red. She did not turn it down. She wanted it to burn. She wanted the water to melt away the smell of industrial bleach and institutional soap.
She closed her eyes. The sound of the rushing water filled her ears.
But the water could not wash away the images. They clawed their way to the front of her mind, sharp and violent.
The rain. The blinding headlights. The sickening sound of metal crushing bone.
Three years ago.
She was standing in the corner of a massive ballroom. The Reese family was celebrating. Asha Reese, the biological daughter they had finally found, was the center of the universe. Asha wore a silk dress that cost more than a car.
Crysta, the adopted daughter, stood in the shadows, a champagne flute trembling in her hand. Her memory of that night was a fractured mosaic of flashing lights and screaming sirens.
The memory shifted. The ballroom faded into a dark, slick road. The sports car tearing through the rain. The impact. A heavy, sickening thud against the front bumper. A body rolling over the windshield.
Then the flashing lights. The absolute chaos. Collins pulling up in his SUV. The family lawyer appearing out of nowhere, his voice cold and sterile.
"You were behind the wheel, Crysta. You were drinking. You take the fall for this DUI. We will get you a minimum security facility. One year, tops. We will take care of everything. You are family."
She remembered looking at her adoptive father. He nodded.
She remembered looking at Collins. He squeezed her hand. "I will wait for you. We will protect you."
She agreed. She trusted them.
But the memory violently shifted to the harsh fluorescent lights of the courtroom. The judge's gavel coming down like an executioner's axe. Maximum sentence. Three years. Maximum security. No protection. No comfortable facility. They had locked her in a cage and thrown away the key, leaving her to be devoured by the system.
Crysta gasped, choking on the shower water. She fell to her knees on the hard fiberglass floor. Her hands gripped her hair, pulling the wet strands until her scalp burned.
They did not protect her. They abandoned her.
She turned off the water. She grabbed a thin, scratchy towel and dried her shivering body.
She looked in the mirror above the sink. The girl staring back had hollow cheeks and dark, bruised skin under her eyes. The soft, naive Crysta Miller died in Cell Block D.
She walked back into the bedroom. She did not turn on the small television. She could not bear the noise. Instead, she crawled into the center of the sagging mattress, pulling the thin, cigarette-burned bedspread up to her chin. She curled her knees to her chest, her body trembling violently. The silence of the room was deafening, but every time she closed her eyes, the silence was shattered by the phantom sounds of her trauma. The clanging of steel doors. The screams from the solitary wing. The heavy boots pacing past her cell.
She lay there for hours, paralyzed by the ghosts of the past three years. She wept until there were no tears left, her breaths coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The darkness outside the window slowly gave way to the gray light of dawn.
By the time the sun fully rose, the visceral panic had burned itself out, leaving behind a hollow, gnawing ache in her stomach. Hunger. It was a primal, grounding force. It forced her to sit up. It forced her to breathe.
She pulled a pen and a piece of motel stationery from the drawer. She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands still shaking slightly, but her mind sharpening with the absolute necessity of survival. She wrote down her remaining cash. She wrote down the cost of food.
Today, she would find a job. She would scrub floors, she would wash dishes. She would survive. Because surviving was the only way she would ever be strong enough to face the people who had left her in the dark.
