Chapter 1

My first semester at Green Mountain College was supposed to be about freedom, about finding out who Emily Carter was without her mother breathing down her neck.

But Susan Carter had other plans.

She called every night, a video call, her face filling my laptop screen, eyes scanning my dorm room for anything out of place, anyone unapproved.

"Who's that, Emily? Is that Chloe? Make sure she's not a bad influence."

Chloe, my roommate, would just roll her eyes from her side of the room.

Our joint bank account was another leash.

A text would ping.

"Emily, $5.75 at the campus coffee shop? What did you get? That expensive latte again? We talked about budgeting."

I bought a black coffee, the cheapest thing they had.

She knew my social media passwords, "for safety," she said.

Sometimes I'd see the little green dot next to her name on Instagram when I was messaging a classmate about a group project.

She'd text minutes later.

"Who is Mark Jennings? Is he in your history class? What are you talking about?"

It wasn't safety, it was a cage.

She said it was because she loved me, because she wanted me to succeed, to be safe in this new world.

She said Dad would have wanted her to look out for me this way.

Dad died when I was ten, a factory accident, she always said, never giving more details.

I just wanted to breathe, to make a mistake on my own, to buy a stupid, expensive coffee without a financial audit and an interrogation.

Chloe tried to be understanding at first.

"My mom's a bit much too," she'd offered once, early on.

But then she saw the daily calls, heard the interrogations through my thin laptop speakers, saw me flinch when my phone buzzed with a text from "Mom."

Her sympathy started to wear thin, replaced by a careful distance.

I didn't blame her.

Who would want to be friends with the girl whose mother was a virtual warden?

I was a freshman at a liberal arts college in Vermont, surrounded by green mountains and new faces, and I had never felt more trapped.

Independence felt like a distant dream, something other students had, not me.

Not Emily Carter.