I looked back at Quinn.

The color had drained from her face.

Her composure was cracking under the weight of a public humiliation my mother had engineered down to the last detail, and she stared at the fourteen-dollar chain in her palm as a single tear finally broke loose and traced down her cheek.

I walked up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders, anchoring her.

“Don’t you ever cry over cheap metal,” I said, quiet but carrying, cutting clean through Presley’s squealing.

I want to be honest about what moved in me then, because it was not the clean protective fury you might expect.