Hurt People

She learned to read hands before she learned to read books.

Willow Jones knows the difference between a touch that asks and a touch that takes. She's known it since she was five years old and a stranger's hands taught her that safety is a word other people get to use.

Now she's eighteen and in a constant state of survival.

Surviving a boyfriend whose love arrives wrapped in poison, surviving a trailer where the walls carry everything, surviving a school that accepted her as a line item and expects her to be grateful.

Then Grayson Parker says her name like it holds weight.

He's her teacher, but he’s also the first person who's ever told her to keep going.

In a world where every hand she's ever known has left a mark, Willow has to learn the hardest lesson of all: that wanting something for herself isn't the same as deserving the wreckage that follows.

Hurt people hurt people. But that was never the whole sentence.