She loved him for ten years. He smiled, he used, and the night he chose another girl, she was left to rot—literally—in a city dump where men broke her body and tried to break her soul. When Joy Bray crawls back into campus filthy and humiliated, the boy she once called a brother sneers, then walks away. That should have been the end. Instead, a quiet neighbor named Cameron Bauer scoops her up, hides her from a world that prefers spectacle over truth, and slowly gives her what she never asked for but needed: dignity, safety, and a love that does not trade her like a piece on a gameboard. But the past bites back. The girl who orchestrated the abuse—Veronica Finley, the campus queen—smiles with poison. Eliot Bernard, Joy’s childhood friend and the student-body golden boy, discovers that guilt does not buy you back what you destroyed. This is a story of clean breaks, slow-burning rescue, and the delicious cruelty of seeing the high and mighty fall. How do you rebuild a life after being discarded? Can a heart damaged by cruelty learn to trust? And when the law, the school, and the public finally come for the people who used her—will Joy take revenge, accept forgiveness, or write her own ending? Who will keep her safe when the city remembers what they almost broke? Who will pay for what they did?

20 Chapters