Marin noticed.
“You seem lighter,” she said one night as we waited backstage.
“I am.”I smiled.“I think I finally believe this is mine, all of it.The words, the readers, the noise.I don’t feel like I have to apologize for it anymore.”
Marin’s answering grin was small and proud.“Took you long enough.”
Before every show, the handlers now had a ritual.They'd lead with a joke, then a quick reminder or note about something I needed to know, then the question: “You ready, Cassidy?”
And today, for the very first time, I smiled widely and answered, “I was born ready for this.”
It wasn’t arrogance.It was truth.
Someone had tried to silence me once.
Now I was louder than ever.
When I stepped onto the stage, I let myself absorb it all, the lights washing over me, the applause building, the wide eyes and tear-streaked cheeks.I thought about the long road between who I’d been and who I was now.The lies.The fear.The courtroom.The nights I’d curled around myself and didn't see a way out.
And now: this.
A crowd of strangers who weren’t really strangers at all.
A family back home who loved me fiercely.
A man who’d made sure I never went hungry, not for food, not for love, not for belief.
I smiled into the mic, feeling the weight of everything I’d built.
“Hi,” I said, voice steady, full.“I’m Cassidy Morgan.Thank you for being here.Tonight, we’re going to talk about what it means to choose yourself.”
The lights warmed my skin.The applause rose again, a wave I didn’t brace against this time.
I stepped into it, arms wide, ready.
Chapter 51
The venue felt like a living thing, heartbeat-strong and bright, breathing me in and out.
Backstage, people moved in practiced lines: a handler with a tablet, a stagehand coiling cable, a tech whispering “check, check” into a headset.
Through the curtain, the buzz from the audience made its way to me.Biggest crowd yet.The kind that might have swallowed me once.
Marin stood in front of me with her producer face on, sleek, unflappable.She handed me my notes, then immediately took them back, because that’s our dance.“You won’t use these,” she said, mouth quirking.“But seeing you holding them will make the handler stop hovering.”
The handler hovered anyway.“We’re at five,” he said, and held up a hand like maybe I needed the visual representation...
The audio tech clipped the tiny transmitter at the back of my waistband and slid the wire under the collar of my dress, movements impersonal and careful.“We’re live to the control room once I flip you,” he warned, fingers at the pack.“We’ll hear you.”
“Thank you,” I replied.
The tech tucked the last bit of cable, pressed a button, and my own breath came back to me in my ear, intimate and strange.Marin left to take a phone call, while the host vamped into the microphone, warming up the crowd, selling my story and the table of merchandise as if they were the same thing.I could hear my countdown now.Three.Two...
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
“Cassidy.”
My body recognized it before my brain did; a muscle memory I wished I didn’t have.
