My mother left me hungry and lonely at 16. When my…

Her eyes were wide, pleading, desperate. She looked at the millions she had already spent in her head. She looked at the trap that had just snapped shut around her ankle.

“Morgan,” she choked out. “You can’t let him do this. You’re his heir.

You can stop it. Tell him we’ll make a deal.”

I leaned back in my chair. The leather was cool against my spine.

For the first time in 18 years, I wasn’t the scared girl waiting on the curb. I was the one holding the keys. “I don’t make deals with terrorists, Mom,” I said.

And then I waited for her to make her move. The silence was the first thing that hit me. It was not the peaceful silence of a library or a church, but the heavy, stagnant silence of a tomb.

I was 16 years old, returning from a six-hour shift at a diner where the grease clung to my skin like a second layer of clothing. I had $12 in tips crumpled in my jeans pocket, and all I wanted was to heat up a frozen burrito and fall asleep to the sound of the television. Usually, the apartment was a cacophony of noise.