I slowly stood. The scrape of my chair cut through the sound of my father’s weeping.

“Stop crying, Mom,” I said. My voice was eerily flat, empty of emotion. The clinical tone of a surgeon preparing to amputate a limb to save a patient.

I looked directly into Chloe’s triumphant, furious eyes. She thought she’d finally broken me. She thought I was about to run to my room in tears.

“A pool party is fine, Chloe,” I said, my voice echoing in the dead silence of the room. “You want me to be normal? You want me to stop hiding?”

Chloe narrowed her eyes—suspicious, but victorious. “Yes.”

“Then I will,” I whispered, feeling the irrevocable weight of my decision settle into my bones. “I’ll wear the bikini.”

I turned and walked away from the table, leaving my parents staring after me in horrified shock and my sister basking in her arrogant victory.

I climbed the stairs, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against the heavy, scarred tissue of my chest. I locked myself in my bathroom, pulled the neon-pink fabric off the counter, and stared at my reflection, knowing that to save my sister’s soul, I was going to have to walk straight into the fires of my own execution…