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"Don't you dare tell me no." My voice cracks and I let it. "You watched me think I was invisible. That was the entire point of me, Theo, invisible, safe, nobody looks at Agnes. And the three of you looked. You looked the whole time and let me go on believing you couldn't see me, and if that's not the funniest thing you've ever paid for, I don't know what all that money's been buying."

"It was never⁠—"

"You want to hear the rest?" I talk right over him, because now that I’ve started, there is no stopping. "Fine. I'll tell you the rest, since I finally understand it. There was never any arrangement to be sweet to a girl who’s in a financial bind. You bought up all my time so no one else could have me. That's not a gift, Theo. That's ownership. You found a woman you could own and made sure she had nowhere else to go. Then you called it helping."

My words hit him, every one of them, and I keep throwing them because I want to hurt him the way he hurt me.

“Every night, I thought I was choosing. Setting my terms, running my room, deciding who got what and when. And the only reason the room had just the three of you in it is that you'd quietly bought out every other seat. My big, brave, independent hustle. You built me a cage and let me decorate it and call it mine.”

His eyes widen, of course. Men like him aren’t used to being called out.

"How much do you actually know about me?" I ask. I watch his face, and his face answers before his mouth can. "You looked, didn't you. Both ends. The daylight and the dark."

"Beck ran your information the first week." He doesn't dress it up. "Your address. That you've got a sister. We figured you're in some kind of money trouble a person doesn't dig out of on a receptionist's paycheck. We knew you were desperate."

"And Sloane," I say. "You told Sloane."

"We didn't tell anyone⁠—"

"Stop." I can't take the denials. Every one of them makes it worse, because I want to believe him and I can't afford to, not again, not ever. "She's been bringing me coffee and asking if I'm all right, and for one stupid second, I let myself think I had a friend in the building. And she was just the one you sent to keep an eye on the joke while it played out."

And that's the one that does it. Not the money. Not the watching. Not even the laughing. Sloane. Because I let her be kind to me, and letting anybody be kind to me does not come easy. But I did it, and it was a lie like all the rest.

The heat spills over before I can stop it. I feel the first tear go down my face, which infuriates me more, which makes me cry more.

"Agnes." Theo takes one step toward me, and his face, God help me, some broken part of me still wants him to touch me. "It was never a joke. Not one second of it. Whatever you believe about the rest, believe that one thing."

"Why would I?" I say. "You've lied to my face every single day since the night you found me. Why would today be the day you started telling the truth?"

He has no answer for that one either.

And standing there in that little room with no windows, with my face wet and my whole invisible life on the floor between us, I understand that I have exactly one thing left that belongs to me. One. The only card the three of them never got to buy, or watch, or manage.

I get to be the one who walks out.

I put one foot in front of the other and I walk out of the windowless room, and Theo Marsh doesn't try to stop me, because he knows it would be pointless. And earn him a kick in the balls, too.

Of course they're waiting. Of course they are. Beck's out of his office, planted in the mouth of the hallway with his hands in his pockets and not one trace of a grin anywhere. Elias is in his own doorway, grimacing and gray. They've been standing out here the whole time, listening to the front-desk girl find out who she really is.

Three men who own half this city, who staged several weeks of my life for their own entertainment, are standing around to see what the toy does when it finds out it's a toy.

So I decide, right there in the hall, that they don't get the show.

I don't cry in front of them. The tears from the other room are already drying on my face and I leave them there, because wiping them would be doing something, and I am finished doing things for these three to watch. I don't scream. I don't ask why. I don't ask which minute of it was real and which was for their entertainment.

I just look at them. Beck first, Beck, who knows what a person wants before they do, and who right now cannot seem to find a single thing to do with his own face. Then Elias, the man who found me and started all of it, watching me like I'm a mistake he'd give anything to undo. Then Theo in the doorway behind me, desperate to rescue things that are not rescuable. I look at each of them long enough to be certain they know I'm not afraid of them.

“You heard me in there. I knew who you were in week two.”

Then, I’m finished looking at them for the rest of my life.

I walk past Beck close enough to smell his shampoo, and he says my name, once, "Agnes," in a voice I have never heard from him, low and stripped of all charm. I don't stop. I've stopped for these men every single day for months. I'm all done stopping.

At the front desk, I take my bag out of the bottom drawer. I leave the headset. I leave the soft cardigan I keep over the back of the chair for when the lobby gets cold, the whole uniform of the girl nobody looks at, because I am not going to be needing her anymore. Nobody moves to stop me. What is there to say.

I walk out through the glass doors of Ardent Capital for the last time, leaving behind the safe, invisible, boring little life I've been guarding with everything I had.

I sit on my bed with my laptop and open CamALot one last time. Diablo's page. The banner across the top: No name. No face. Nothing for free. All those strangers who never once saw my face and still managed to see more of me than anyone in my whole life ever bothered to.