REBORN BEFORE THE END: MY EX'S FAMILY WILL STARVE FIRST의 모든 챕터: 챕터 1 - 챕터 6

The cold was the first thing to stop hurting.That was how I knew I was really dying.I was sitting against the cracked wall of a pharmacy that had been looted down to its bare shelving, my knees pulled to my chest, my good winter coat long gone. Garrick's mother had needed it, she'd said. Winnifred Hale always needed whatever I had.Above the dead city, the sky was still open. A long wound of silver light had been hanging in the east for six days, quiet and wrong, as if the world had been unzipped. Nobody could explain it. Everyone had stopped trying. Things had started coming out of it on the first night, and the temperature had been falling since the second.I had stopped counting days around the time I stopped feeling my fingers."Dess," I whispered to nobody. My own name. It was the only thing I still owned.Everything else had belonged to the Hales for months. My savings, which Garrick called "our future" while he moved it, one transfer at a time, into accounts I had never

He had full access to this account. So I opened a different bank's app, one I had never used, set up a new account with my own ID, and moved every cent I could. It took twelve minutes and two verification codes. When it was done, the old account held exactly twelve dollars and sixty cents. I looked at that number and thought, Keep it, Garrick. Buy yourself a sandwich. It felt strange, how quickly my hands knew what to do. In my first life, I had spent six years believing I was bad with money, because that was what everyone told me. But I had run shipments across three states. I had balanced budgets for entire warehouses. I had simply never been allowed to apply any of it to myself I was good at this. I had always been good at this. Nobody had ever told me, because it had been so much more convenient for them if I didn't know. It was nearly eleven when I finally stopped, my coffee cold, my phone full of proof. I sat there in the quiet kitchen, listening to the refrige

He was a boy in an expensive shirt who had never once been told no. "Dess. Babe. Come on. Let's talk about this. You're being hysterical." "I'm very calm," I said. "Please leave." He changed tactics, the way he always did. His face softened, and his voice dropped, and he reached for my hand. "I love you. You know that. I was going to tell you—" "About Cressida?" He jerked back as if I'd slapped him. "Out," I said. It took another four minutes, a few more insults from Winnifred, and a threat from Garrick that I wouldn't last a month on my own, before they finally went. At the door, Garrick turned back with a look so full of poison that it would have terrified me once. "You think you're so smart," he said softly. "You think this is over? Check your bank account, Dess." Then he slammed the door. The apartment went quiet. I stood very still. The china gleamed on the table, the good plates, the untouched roast chicken, and I started to shake. Not from fear.