Zoe POV

My mother looks down at me from the platform edge and her expression doesn’t change.

Not anger, exactly. Anger would at least be warm. What she gives me is the particular cold of someone looking at an inconvenience — a thing that has embarrassed her in public again, exactly as she always knew it would.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve a daughter like you,” she says. The crowd is silent enough that every word carries. “You stand up here and ...