The words that still haunted her—lucky that you’re pretty, failure, waste of time, aimless, vapid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It wasn’t until she started seeing Tabby that she realized just how horribly Natalia had treated her. She’d known her situation was bad, but she’d spent three years justifying, making herself smaller, hacking off pieces of herself to fit into the box Nat expected her to fit inside. And yet no matter how hard she tried, no matter how much she compromised, how often she soothed Nat’s temper, none of her efforts were good enough. She was never good enough.
