In the morning, Sarah hid the stone and hurried off to school.
After she left, her mother entered her room. Susan had been a stunningly beautiful woman in her 20s. Now, after a painful divorce with Sarah's father, childbirth, and other hardships, she was not quite the model she had wished to be.
Alimony paid for some things, but Susan still worked as a secretary at a law firm downtown and dreamed of, despite her daughter's best efforts to resist, the future she was denied for Sarah.
She snuck into Sarah's room. The girl was being secretive of late, and she needed to find out why.
