Prologue #3
The room seemed to tilt as disbelief washed over me. The words landed harder than any slap I’d felt at her hands growing up. Her mother was looking directly at her and choosing him. Just like she always chose any and everything but her, including her damn self.
“You ain’t nothing but a fast little bitch,” Jeanette snapped.
Lane finally broke. It was like a rope that had been fraying for years finally giving way. The desperate need for her mother’s love left her with no hope for a happy, healthy life with Jeanette Sanders.
There was nothing to save, no love to wait for, and nothing that would fix them.
Without another word, she turned around and walked to her room, pulled her old duffel bag from beneath the bed, and started packing.
Clothes went into the duffel. Everything else went into a trash bag.
Her books, notebooks, and college acceptance letters she’d already started receiving went into her backpack.
The life she’d built in secret was being uprooted to who knows where.
As she packed, Jeanette never came to check on her or see what she was doing.
Twenty minutes later, Lane walked out the front door carrying everything she owned.
The apartment door closed behind her, and that was the last time she ever lived with her mother.
The first few months on her own were brutal.
She slept wherever she could. Friends’ couches, cheap motels that didn’t care about I.D.
as long as the money was green. Survival introduced her to choices she never imagined she’d make.
Using fake documents and a fake ID, Lane became someone else at night—a midnight ballerina who pulled men into the fancies Lavender Haze sold them.
The stage lights didn’t care where she came from.
The customers didn’t care about report cards or scholarships.
Nobody cared about the bruises she carried beneath her smile.
They cared about the fantasy, and selling the fantasy paid.
Lane hated parts of the job, but she appreciated what it gave her.
She no longer had to wonder where her next meal was coming from or if someone was waiting to corner her in the bathroom.
Her profession came with men trying to threaten her safety because they were dogs who assumed that shaking ass on a pole came with a side of cat.
Men looked at her on stage and decided they knew her based on the way she moved beneath the lights—leading to them creating stories about what kind of woman she must be.
Some offered money and most offered bullshit promises they wouldn’t keep, but they dressed it up romantically.
Many of them shot their shot, taking her rejection in stride.
A few got handsy, and security whooped their asses and tossed them out.
Lane was thankful she’d never encountered a Myron ass nigga, but she still kept a razor blade under her tongue just in case.
What nobody understood was Lane had never fantasized about exotic dancing; it was merely a means of survival in a world where she knew how much grown men coveted her body.
For as long as she could remember, men felt entitled to her; this included her mother’s boyfriends who had looked too long and strangers who had commented too freely.
Men chased her near and far, convinced that persistence would eventually wear her down—it never did.
Lane decided early that if she ever gave her heart or her body to someone, it would happen on her terms and in her own time. Not because she was pressured or desperate.
By day she was an honor student, by night she danced before returning to her motel room to finish her homework and sleep for a few hours.
It was a rinse-and-repeat cycle that nobody knew about—not her teachers or her classmates.
She carried the secret alone and would continue to do so until she graduated high school and left Stonebridge.
The most painful part wasn’t what she was doing. It was what never happened—Jeanette never caring enough to find her or even report her missing. Lane had to accept that her mother hadn’t lost her; her mother had let her go.
Lane applied to every school she could think of and got into every one.
The acceptance letters arrived one after another to the motel front desk.
The small joy she had was knowing that her mother had been wrong and she was better than her circumstances.
Every letter was proof that survival wasn’t the end of her story.
When the scholarship offer from North Carolina A most importantly, she was protective of her peace.
Years passed, and the girl who had spent so much of her life fighting to keep ownership of herself eventually became a woman who understood that waiting was not something to be ashamed of. The power she felt knowing the choice belonged entirely to her often made her smile.
After graduation, Lane landed a job with a modeling agency doing talent acquisition. That’s how she met Nova Sinclair and, by proxy, Cadence Samuels. These women would become her sisters and her chosen family—the people who loved her without requiring pieces of her in return.
Lane stepped out on faith years later, launching her own thriving management company.
Perseverance took her from a girl who once lived in a motel while doing what she had to do to survive to a woman who built careers for others.
Long gone were the days of wondering where her next meal would come from because not only could she feed herself these days, she also owned and operated a food bank that fed the community.
The girl nobody came looking for became someone impossible to ignore.
Yet some scars never fully disappeared and certain ghosts refused to stay in the closet.
Which was exactly why years later, when her phone lit up with an unfamiliar number and a message that made her blood run cold—Lane realized the past wasn’t done with her just yet. It was finally coming to collect, and she wouldn’t be bullied by it.