CHAPTER ONE #3
"One-way ticket to New York," I told the clerk, handing over my driver's license and three hundred dollars in cash. "LaGuardia, please."
She typed efficiently, her eyes scanning her screen. "That'll be two hundred and eighty-five dollars. You have any checked baggage?"
"Just this," I said, lifting my duffle. "Carry-on only."
She printed my boarding pass and handed it across the counter without looking up. "Gate B12. Boarding starts at five-thirty. Flight departs at six."
I took the pass with trembling fingers and made my way through security, my heart hammering as I placed my bag on the conveyor belt and walked through the metal detector. The TSA agent waved me through without incident. I retrieved my duffle on the other side, my shoulders sagging with relief.
The gate area was already filling up with passengers.
I found a seat near the window and sat down, pulling my coat tighter around my shoulders.
My phone buzzed in my pocket—another text from Joshua, likely waking up to drive past my mother's house again.
With a steady hand, I switched my phone to airplane mode and slid it deep into my bag.
For the first time in three days, the ringing stopped. The silence was glorious.
At five-thirty, the gate agent began calling boarding groups. I stood in line with my boarding pass, my legs feeling unsteady beneath me. When I handed it to the agent, she scanned it and nodded me through the jet bridge.
The narrow aisle of the plane seemed to stretch forever. I found my seat in the back, stowed my duffle in the overhead bin, and slid into the window seat. The aircraft filled slowly with other passengers—businessmen in dark suits, a few families, an elderly couple holding hands.
I pressed my forehead against the cool plastic window and waited.
The engines roared to life with a deep, powerful rumble.
The plane pushed back from the gate, taxied slowly across the tarmac, and then accelerated down the runway.
My stomach lurched as the wheels lifted off the ground, and suddenly we were airborne, climbing higher and higher into the grey morning sky.
The anxiety that had been coiled in my chest for three days began to loosen, just slightly. I was leaving. I was actually leaving. Joshua couldn't reach me here. Maggie couldn't find me. No one from Cleveland could touch me at thirty thousand feet.
The flight to New York took just over an hour and a half. I spent most of it staring out the window, watching the landscape shift beneath the clouds, my mind circling the same thoughts over and over.
His hateful, self-serving words replayed in my ears like a broken record.
Joshua's face when I walked in. The way Maggie had looked at me—not guilty, not sorry, just annoyed that I'd interrupted.
My hands clenched into tight fists in my lap, my short nails biting into the leather of my gloves.
I had thought waiting meant something. I had believed, with all my heart, that choosing to save my virginity for marriage was an act of sacred self-respect, a gift meant for a man who truly cherished my mind and soul before claiming my body.
I had thought it was romantic. Special. Something worth cherishing.
To Joshua, it had merely been an obstacle. A frustrating inconvenience. A locked door that justified him crawling into bed with my best friend the second my back was turned.
And Maggie—God, Maggie had known everything. She had sat across the kitchen table from me for eight months, drinking wine, listening to me talk about my values, pretending to admire my boundaries, all while waiting for the perfect opportunity to take him behind my back.
The tears that had threatened to spill dried up completely, replaced by a scorching, incandescent fury.
The anger felt good. Clean. Powerful. It burned away the agonizing sting of rejection and left something much harder, much colder, in its wake. It was the first time since opening that apartment door that I felt like I was holding the steering wheel of my own life.
The plane descended through the clouds as we approached LaGuardia. The landing was smooth, the wheels touching down with a gentle bump. We taxied to the gate, and I gathered my duffle, my legs stiff from the cramped seat.
Around me, seatbelts clicked open and overhead bins banged down as passengers began clamoring to get off.
I stayed frozen for a heartbeat, my knuckles white against the strap of my duffle bag.
My ribs ached where the thick brick of almost eight thousand dollars in cash pressed securely against my chest beneath my zipped jacket.
My eyes burned, gritty from seventy-two hours of tears, adrenaline, and little sleep.
I stood on stiff, shaking legs and joined the slow crawl down the aisle.
The terminal was a barrage of noise and motion.
Luggage wheels clattered across tiled floors, flight monitors flickered with hundreds of departures, and voices echoed in a dozen languages.
I moved through the crowd like a ghost, keeping my head down, my gaze darting warily around every corner as if Joshua might materialize from behind a kiosk to grab my arm and demand I listen to his excuses.
You're in New York, I reminded myself, my chest tightening. He doesn't know where you are. Nobody does.
I followed the overhead signs toward ground transportation and pushed through the automated double doors into the crisp October air.
The scent of New York hit me immediately—a cocktail of cold river wind, vehicle exhaust, roasted coffee, and roasted nuts from a street cart.
It was sharper, louder, and infinitely more alive than anything in Cleveland.
I stepped up to the taxi queue, waiting until the dispatcher flagged a bright yellow cab to the curb.
"Where to?" the cabbie asked without looking back as I hauled my duffle into the rear footwell and slid across the cracked vinyl seat.
"Midtown Manhattan," I said, my voice hoarse. I swallowed hard and recited the address from memory—every syllable etched into my brain from an old piece of mail I’d seen years ago. "Park Avenue. Near Fifty-Second."
The driver grunted, clicked the meter into gear, and merged aggressively into the tangle of traffic heading toward the Grand Central Parkway.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching the landscape shift. Low-slung brick warehouses and rows of Queens apartments gradually gave way to the soaring steel spans of the bridge. And then, there it was: Manhattan.
The skyline rose against the autumn sky like an impenetrable wall of jagged glass and stone.
It was breathtaking and terrifying all at once.
For eleven years, my father had treated this city like a forbidden zone.
It's dangerous, Guilietta. My work is complicated.
Stay in Ohio where you're safe. Every time I’d begged to visit him for a weekend, to see where he spent five days out of every week, he had shut me down with an absolute, immovable finality.
Now, as the taxi plunged off the bridge and into the roaring canyons of Midtown, surrounded by towering skyscrapers that blocked out the midday sun, the sheer weight of what I’d done began to settle into my bones.
I had run away from the only life I knew.
I had walked in on the boy I loved panting over my best friend, packed my bags, and fled across state lines.
But underneath the crushing heartbreak, a hard, sharp ember of anger had ignited.
I was done crying in my childhood bedroom.
I was done letting Joshua’s endless calls and hollow apologies dictate my breathing. I felt something crystallize inside me.
I was going to find my father. I was going to look him in the eye and make him give me a place to stand.
And I was never going back.
"Here you go, miss. Corner of Fifty-Second and Park," the driver announced, pulling up beside a polished granite curb.
The fare was sixty-eight dollars. I peeled a hundred from the cash stash inside my jacket, handed them to him, and told him to keep the change.
When I stepped out onto the sidewalk, the sheer scale of the building took the breath right out of my lungs.
It was a monolith. A sleek, imposing glass-and-steel fortress stretching at least sixty stories straight into the clouds.
Black tinted windows reflected the pale sky, and heavy bronze framing flanked the towering revolving doors.
There was no company name carved into the stone—only a discreet brass plaque bearing the street number.
Sleek black town cars and polished SUVs with tinted windows idled along the private curb, their drivers standing at attention.
This didn't look like an ordinary corporate finance firm. It looked like a citadel.
My heart hammered against my ribs, but I hitched the strap of my duffle higher on my shoulder, squared my posture, and pushed through the heavy revolving doors.
The lobby was a cathedral of wealth and quiet authority.
Vast slabs of imported Italian marble stretched from wall to wall, polished to such a high mirror shine that I could see my own reflection beneath my boots.
Modern bronze light fixtures cascaded from a soaring three-story ceiling, casting a warm, muted glow over the space.
Dozens of men in razor-sharp, bespoke charcoal and navy suits moved across the floor with purposeful, predatory strides.
Several had discreet spiral earpieces tucked behind their ears.
Security guards in tailored blazers stood posted at every elevator bank, their eyes scanning every face that entered with ruthless efficiency.
I felt instantly, glaringly out of place. My dark jeans, oversized knit sweater, and messy chestnut hair bore the rumpled imprint of an early-morning airport sprint and a cramped flight. I looked like an exhausted college student who had wandered onto the set of a high-stakes thriller.