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you're a rich girl and you've gone too far cause you know it doesn't matter anyway, chapter 7 of below deck au is out now!

Trinity’s phone vibrating woke her up.

At first, she thought it was Victoria or Cassie.

Victoria had been texting her constantly for two days, mostly variations of are you alive??, did you get murdered??, and do we need to send a wellness check? While Trinity had completely ignored all of Cassie’s messages. Trinity had responded to the first one of Victoria’s texts and then ignored the rest. She had another full day before the next charter started anyways.

The room was still dark with the curtains drawn over the windows. Both of the other women were asleep, yet both somehow, still touching her. Yolanda was behind her with one arm draped over Trinity’s waist while Baran was on her other side, turned towards them in her sleep, one hand resting against Trinity’s thigh as she had reached for her at some point in the night. It should have made Trinity feel pinned or crowded.

Instead, for one disorienting second before she reached for her phone, she just felt safe.

Trinity stretched one arm towards the nightstand, being careful to not jostle Yolanda’s too much. Yolanda still made a low, irritated sound in her sleep and tightened her hold around Trinity for half a second before settling again. Trinity smiled and had to bite the inside of her cheek to stop it from becoming stupid.

Her phone lit up the room too quickly. She quickly dropped it back down onto the bed, glancing behind her to make sure that she hadn’t woken up Yolanda before looking at Baran again. Typically Baran was awake before Trinity woke up. She had never seen her still asleep. Her lips were slightly parted.

Trinity watched her chest rise and fall for longer than she meant to.

After biting her lip to contain the smile on her face from growing any wider, she tucked the phone under the covers before tilting it to face the mattress while dragging down the brightness before looking at it again. It was a spam message, but when she looked, she had unread messages from her WhatsApp chat with her brothers.

She clicked open the messages.

The smile dropped from her mouth. The dark room seemed to tilt around her. She sat up before she fully knew what she was doing. Yolanda’s arm slipped from her waist and Baran’s fingers fell away from her thigh as she sat up. Neither of them woke up, although Baran murmured something softly before turning her face deeper into the pillow.

She read the messages again and again.

It didn’t make sense.

Trinity hadn’t paid. She hadn’t called the school or transferred any money to anyone.

She tried to slid out of bed without waking them and grabbed a robe from the closet on her way to the bathroom. Her hands were shaking too much to tie it around herself, so she just wrapped it around herself. The bathroom door shut softly behind her. She locked the door and turned on the shower before sitting down on the floor next to the shower. She stared at the messages for another couple of minutes trying to make sense of it.

If she hadn’t paid—“everything sorted?” Trinity suddenly remembered Baran saying as Yolanda had met them for dinner yesterday. Then the satisfied smile on Yolanda’s face when she replied “all taken care of” with her hand on the back of Trinity’s neck.

Trinity’s stomach twisted so hard that she rested her forehead on her knees for a few moments.

He’s letting us stay here for free now, Trinity. Her mother’s voice entered the bathroom so clearly that Trinity pressed the heels of her hands to her eyelids to try and stop it, the way she used to do as a child. Do you want your brothers to be homeless?

Trinity knew she wasn’t thirteen. She knew she was in Croatia and not in Ohio. She was on the floor of a hotel bathroom and not standing in her mother’s bedroom trying to explain what had happened. She knew Yolanda and Baran were not him.

She knew that. Yet, with panic pressing on her chest, the lines blurred.

Just because Trinity was older now and their hands were kind didn’t mean that the payment wasn’t still her body.

She sat on the heated tile floor of the hotel bathroom and all she could think was how did she let herself get in this situation again?

The realization burned through her from the inside out, starting in her chest and spreading until her entire body felt like it was on fire. It wasn’t even anger, she wished it was anger. Instead, it was shame that burned through her because she knew better.

How did she let this happen twice?

It felt like the same trap, set up just nearly ten years apart. Both of her brothers’ futures sat on her compliance.

Both times, it had been Trinity’s fault.

Trinity had been the one to tell her coach.

She had been twelve and he had been her coach for over a year at that point. He ran the girls’ gymnastics program at the school and knew all of them by name. He always paid extra attention to Trinity and told her that she was talented and special. He would always say that she was more mature than the other girls, like it was something to be proud of. It always made her go a little shy, because nobody thought those things about her.

He knew that her mother worked doubles. He knew that Trinity walked Theo home from preschool and brought Luca to practices sometimes because there was nobody else to watch him. He knew that Luca was almost two and still not sleeping through the night, which meant Trinity wasn’t sleeping through the night either. She had to watch them when her mother went to her overnight shifts. He knew all of it, because she had told him.

The afternoon she told him, things were bad. It was worse than usual. Her mother had been on the phone all week trying to find some place for them to go, but there was nowhere. The only option left had been the car. They had slept it in before, but that was before Theo and Luca. Trinity couldn’t let them stay in the car. She just couldn’t.

Trinity was so tired. She was twelve and was so, so tired of having to be the one that held it together. So, when he sat next to her and grabbed her hand asking her what was wrong, she told him.

Trinity told him everything because nobody else had ever wanted to help her.

He had sat there and listened to her talk like she mattered. He had squeezed her small hand and told her that she was a good sister and Trinity had cried.

And then he helped.

By the following week, they had moved into his house with no deposit or first or last rent due. It was a duplex that he lived in the basement apartment of. Trinity hadn’t thought anything of that. He had told her mom that the door was broken between the two units, but he would work on fixing it. Trinity remembered her mother crying and calling him a godsend. Her mother had hugged her and told her that this was the best that had happened to them.

Trinity had felt so proud. She had fixed it. She had found them a home. She had saved them.

Trinity fixed up her new bedroom and made it into a little oasis for herself with all her ribbons and pictures hanging on the walls. It was a place all to herself. Someplace that her brothers couldn’t come into and her mother would leave her alone in. She had never had her own room before. First it had been a shared studio with her mother and then in the past few two-bedrooms, she’d share her bed with Theo while Luca slept in the crib that took up the majority of the room. She saved her money to be able to buy a string of cheap lights from the dollar store and hung them around the windows.

Each morning she would make her bed with a precision that would have even impressed Samira. He had bought her the bed sheet when they moved in, a light green that was her favorite color, something he knew that even her mother didn’t. She thought it just meant he paid attention.

She thought it was a good thing.

It started three months later a week after her thirteenth birthday.

Maybe it had started before then and it was only clear to her when he came into her bedroom that night. Maybe it had all just been groundwork before then.

Maybe it had started the second she had opened her fucking mouth and told him what was wrong.

It didn’t take her very long to understand that the room had never been hers at all.

It was the same fucking thing now just in a language ten years older. She had told them about the boys, about how badly she wanted it. All while drinking in a restaurant that she didn’t belong in, Trinity had given them everything they needed to trap her, not in a bedroom, but in something else.

But she wasn’t thirteen anymore.

This time, Trinity had another option, and somehow it felt almost as terrible as having none at all.

-------------------------------------------------

Trinity’s eyes filled with tears as she pressed send.

She wouldn’t be indebted to Yolanda and Baran the way her family had been indebted to Mr.—no, she would never go through that again. Trinity scratched at her thigh as she pulled up her own banking app just to double check the number as tears stayed painfully in her eyes.

The number had never been enough, really. Not for the entirety of medical school anyway. It wasn’t enough for rent and emergencies and all the possibilities that would go wrong because nothing in her life was easy. But it had been hers. And it had one that had given her the hope of a future without the strings of her past.

Just a few hours ago, Baran had been whispering in her ear that she could rest.

Trinity had laid between them and thought she was safe.

She could almost laugh at how wrong she had been.

When she finally committed to calling, Trinity made sure to dial one before the number. It rang long enough that she hoped no one would answer. She hoped that maybe this was all a mistake and the chains of debt weren’t locked around her again.

Instead, someone picked up and gave her the information she was afraid of.

---------------------

As soon as Trinity got the confirmation email, she hung up the phone, leaned over the toilet and threw up.

It was over.

It was all over.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat on the bathroom floor until her phone buzzed in her hand again.

There was a message from Cassie underneath it in her WhatsApp that came in at the same time.

Too late, Trinity thought.

She had already made the only decision that she could live with.

------------------------------------------------------

A knock came from the other side of the bathroom door after she threw up for the second time.

“Trinity?” The sound of Baran’s voice caused her entire body to tense. She sounded worried. She sounded like the woman who had kissed her last night and told her she could sleep, that nobody would need anything from her. God, Trinity was going to be sick again. “What is going on in there?

“Did you get sick?” Yolanda’s voice came through the door next, still a bit thick with sleep. Trinity briefly wondered what woke them up. If it had been her missing body in the bed or the sound of her getting sick in the bathroom, either way they had come looking for their—what? Trinity could remember Yolanda calling her “our girl” in bed and the idea made her nauseous now. More like their project. Just like Cassie had tried to warn her about.

“We heard the shower. Are you feeling alright?”

Trinity wiped her face with both hands before forcing herself to stand. She turned off the shower.

“I’m fine,” she told them through the door. It was the oldest lie she knew, the first sentence she had learned.

There was a pause on the other side of the door. She could almost picture them looking at each other and having one of those silent conversations that she had thought, hoped, maybe she would get to be part of one day. Trinity had thought it was beautiful once. Now, she just wondered what they were actually thinking about her.

Yolanda’s voice came through again, “Trinity, open the door.”

Trinity looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were red and swollen. She looked young. She looked stupid. She was only in a robe and she had their marks all over her. The evidence on her skin that she had thought meant she was wanted and now knew were only branding.

“No,” she said.

There was another moment of silence before Baran spoke again. “Shirinam, what happened?”

“Don’t call me that,” her voice was sharp.

The door rattled again, like someone was testing whether the lock was good. Trinity stepped back from the door so quickly that her hip hit the edge of the counter. “Don’t do that.”

She was twenty-two; she wasn’t thirteen. She was in the hotel bathroom, not her bedroom.

On the other side of the door, Baran inhaled sharply and said, “okay.” She could hear the soft rustle of feet moving back over the carpet. “Okay, we moved. We won't touch the door.”

It made the panic more humiliating.

“Trinity, what happened?” Baran asked again. Her voice was careful in a way that made Trinity want to peel off her own skin. Was she just an experiment to the woman? Something to play with outside of her lab? “Please, tell us what’s wrong.”

The question made her laugh, but it came out ugly and wrong.

“What’s happened?” Trinity repeated. “What’s wrong?”

“Yes,” Yolanda replied, voice steadier now, but there was a hint of edge in it. “Tell us what happened so we can help you.”

Help.

Trinity couldn’t stand them pretending they didn’t know what they did. “You paid their tuition.”

There was silence on the other side of the door that made her angrier. There was no denial or asking what she meant.

Only a silence that told her she had been right. It was the quiet of a plan that had gone wrong.

Had Baran kissed her wrist last night with a ledger open in her mind? Had Yolanda held her waist in her sleep like a person guarding an investment?

“I called the school,” Trinity told them through the door. “They are refunding you.”

“That’s fine. We can talk about it. It’s just money.”

Trinity laughed before clasping her hand tight against her mouth before it broke into a sob.

It’s just money.

It was just the thing she had spent the past three summers earning. Just the thing that stood between her and the rest of her life. Just her entire future waved away by two women who had never once stopped to think about what they were doing.

Like it was something so small that Yolanda could just wave it away. Like it hadn’t been Trinity’s entire future.

How could she have not seen that this never could have worked?

“That’s a lot of fucking money.” She hung desperately onto her anger, she wouldn’t let them hear her cry.

“Okay,” Yolanda said, like that wasn’t the issue. “That’s okay. We can talk about it. Just open the door, Trinity.”

Trinity looked around the bathroom for anything she had brought in with her. Her phone was the only thing in here. Nothing else. Her clothes were still in the bedroom along with everything Victoria had packed for her. She was wearing the hotel robe and no underwear, and the thought of walking through the suite like this in front of them made her stomach turn.

But she could not stay in the bathroom.

Trinity opened the door before she could lose her nerve.

Yolanda had the other robe on while Baran was wrapped in one of the sheets from the bed. Right, Trinity thought, looking down at herself for a second. Two robes. Not three. Another clear sign that she did not belong here. One she should have noticed before the trap had been set.

God, she was so stupid.

For one hot second she thought of taking off the robe and shoving it at Baran.

“Here. Take it. Take it all back,” she would shout (beg). But she couldn’t stomach the thought of being naked in front of them. She tugged on her shorts under the robe that she had set folded on the chair, like proof that she had taken them off willingly.

She had walked into this trap with both eyes open and not seen it.

Everything made her angrier as she walked past them and started gathering her things.

“Trinity, please, let’s talk about this,” Baran said, following after her. “This isn’t how I thought it would—”

Trinity turned so fast that the edges of her vision blurred for a second. “What, you thought you’d wake up with me between your legs thanking you?”

Baran stopped like Trinity had put a knife to her throat.

“Trinity that is not—“

“No?” she laughed and tried to blink back the tears that started to swell in her eyes. “What then? You thought I'd cry? I’d wake up and see the text from my brother and be so overwhelmed by your generosity that I’d what? Let you fuck me however you want? Both at once maybe?”

Baran flinched and Yolanda stepped forward, “Trinity.”

She turned to face her. Yolanda had pulled off her bonnet sometime between Trinity going to the bathroom and leaving it and now her curly hair stayed loose around her shoulders. She had always thought Yolanda looked like a dream.

Hadn’t all of Trinity’s nightmares started off as dreams?

She was too angry to stop, too scared to stop. Every word that left her mouth made it uglier, but that was good.

People didn’t want ugly things, ugly meant she could leave.

“Is that what you wanted?” Trinity sneered. “Me crawling on the floor for you? Saying thank you with my body for, what, the entire time they are in school? For how many more years? Or just until I’m a little older?”

“That is enough,” Yolanda’s voice was low and firm, the exact voice that Trinity’s body had responded to for the past two days, that had made her arch and beg in the dark.

For a second, she was so startled that she almost obeyed it. Then rage came up hot enough to overpower the reflex.

“Oh, now it’s enough?” Trinity laughed as she turned around, her cheeks flaring as she quickly pulled the robe off and her shirt back on, forgoing the bra because she couldn’t find it and wouldn’t spend another second being half-naked. “There’s a line? There wasn’t a line when you were paying for my brother’s school behind my back, but now there’s a line?”

“Trinity, please, let’s just—”

She couldn’t let Barn continue, couldn’t let her make some excuse that makes what they did okay. It was not okay. Nothing about this was okay. But if Baran kept talking in that broken way, if Trinity let her make excuses like he had, like her mother had, then she’d end up back in the bed, under the same debt.

“You think you can just pay for my brother's school and what? I’ll have to keep sleeping with you?”

If Trinity had any sort of sanity left in her mind, she would recognize the shock and appalled looks in their faces. But Trinity couldn’t see any of it. All she could see was her mom standing in front of her when she tried to tell her the first time he came into her bedroom at night. She couldn’t see Yolanda’s face forming the question what happened and putting things together in her head.

“Trinity, I think—“

“I think you just go through this world not having to think,” she interrupted again. “I think you see a problem and you throw money at it because money fixes things for you. Because you have enough of it that it doesn’t mean anything. You don’t have to wonder what somebody is going to ask for later. You don’t have to wonder what happens when you can’t pay it back.”

She feels like a trapped dog. She should just leave. The door was right behind them, Cassie was downstairs.

“What do you mean pay it back?” Yolanda asked.

“Poor girl has a poor girl problem, but luckily you have the money to fix it, right? You can fix and make sure that you can take her home with you, right?”

“No,” Baran said. She was crying now, tears spilling over. Trinity had never seen her like this. She had never wanted to see her like this. It should make her feel good. It should make her feel some sort of vindication, but it doesn’t. It only hurt. “No, Trinity, that’s not it.”

“That’s not how we see you,” Yolanda agreed.

“I don’t care how you see me.”

That was a lie. She had cared so much that it was eating her alive. She had cared because she thought they saw her as someone worth seeing.

Her.

Trinity Santos.

She thought they had seen her as someone who deserved beautiful things and a future.

Or maybe they had only seen something they wanted to dress up. Someone they could buy things for and put outfits on and take photos of. A project or better yet, a pet.

A sad girl with no resources that was perfect for the taking because she would just offer herself up.

The thought came so fast that she nearly choked on it. She looked over to where the dress was still hung in the closet. It looked like nothing she would ever wear now. She didn’t even attempt to grab for it.

“Was that part of it too?”

Neither of them could respond fast enough.

“The dress? The necklace? The sunglasses?” She laughed, rubbing her hand across her forehead. “Taking pictures of me like I was some little doll you got to dress up for dinner.”

“No.”

“No?” Trinity hated it all. “You dressed me up and you sat me between the two of you like I belonged there. And I just—I just let you. I didn’t even stop to think about why you both would want someone like me there.”

Baran made a hurt noise. “Because we wanted you there.”

“No,” Trinity shook her head so hard it hurt. “You wanted me there because it’s fun for you. You see how young I am, see how desperate I was and it gets you off.”

“That is not—” Baran’s voice was breaking.

“You didn’t ask me. You didn’t ask me about any of it,” Trinity kept going because she couldn’t stop now. “You asked my captain. You sent a car for my things. You bought me things you picked every. I just thought that it was what being cared for was, nobody had ever done it before, so I didn’t know. God, I was so stupid. I liked it too. I thought you wanted me.”

That was the humiliating part. Trinity had liked all of it. She liked being touched and having them pay attention to her. She liked all of it.

Just like she had liked her own bedroom.

A sob came up and she had to swallow it back.

“We do want you,” Yolanda said.

“No, you wanted to keep me.” The distinction burned.

Trinity wiped her face with her wrist.

“We made a mistake,” Baran said, and her voice was trembling now. “A terrible one. I see that. I’m sorry. Please, Trinity, just stay long enough for us to talk about it.”

It was the wrong word to say.

“Stay?” she asked slowly. “Stay because your brothers need this. Stay because where else are you going to go? Stay because after everything we’ve done for you, the least you can do is not make be difficult.”

“Trinity,” Yolanda said, voice lower now, careful in a way that made Trinity want to scream. “No one is saying that.”

“You don’t have to say it! Nobody ever says it! That’s just how it works. The rent—” she shook her head, catching herself, “the tuition gets paid for and nobody ever hands you the bill. But you know it’s there. It’s there and you can’t say no.” She’s shoved the rest of her items in her bag now with hands shaking. Trinity gave up on trying to zipper her bag shut. “You can’t say no, because saying no means it can be taken away.”

“Trinity, that's not it. We wouldn’t—we can talk about this.”

Trinity doesn’t want to talk. Talking was what they wanted. Talking was how they had gotten her in the first place. She was done talking.

She wanted them to understand.

“I’m not going to medical school in the fall. Was that the plan all along too? Make it so I couldn’t even make my own money?”

They both went very still like they didn’t understand what she just said.

“What do you mean?” Yolanda asked.

Trinity stared at them.

For one stupid second, Trinity didn’t get it.

Then she realized they genuinely did not connect the dots. They had known her brother’s school cost more than Trinity could afford, but they had not made the next step because why would they? She laughed again, and this time it sounded almost like a sob.

Somehow they didn’t realize that they couldn’t take it back. They didn’t realize that Trinity had to sit on the phone in the bathroom and make a call she had never wanted to make.

Trinity had closed her eyes when the secretary on the phone told her that the full semester balance was paid yesterday while she sat in the bathroom floor.

Yesterday when Baran had taken her to dinner when they said Yolanda was taking care of something. Yesterday when Trinity thought they were being sweet because they kept asking about her brothers after her embarrassing display that afternoon with her mother. Yesterday when Yolanda had come back with a satisfied smile on her face and touched the back of Trinity’s neck in a way that had felt warm like affection, but now felt like branding.

Yesterday when she had said too fucking much and finally gave them the ammunition apparently they had been waiting for.

She was so fucking stupid.

Trinity had swallowed around the knot in her throat and told the secretary that it was a mistake. The secretary had then told her that if they refunded it, there would be an outstanding balance.

Trinity knew that. She knew that it would bring them back to the same starting point. She didn’t need to hear the secretary mention that they wouldn’t be able to finalize their enrollment and ask if Trinity wanted to go ahead with the reversal and cancel the enrollment for the two.

She had said no immediately.

Luca would never forgive her. Trinity could see it with a clarity that made her chest hurt. Luca, who was eleven and spent the last almost week not texting her back, would never be able to understand it. He wouldn’t understand refunds or admissions processes. He would just see that Trinity had undone the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He would only understand that it was his and then it wasn’t. And Trinity wouldn’t be the person to do that to him. She wouldn’t be the reason that he learned the lesson at eleven that she had learned at thirteen that the people who were supposed to protect you could be the ones to hurt you the most.

She would never do that even if it cost her everything she had.

Trinity had swallowed what was left of her pride and asked to pay over the phone.

Within five minutes, it had all been gone. All the cash that sat between her and needing someone. The thousands she had earned by working summers until her hands cracked from salt and rope.

The money that had meant maybe this time she could choose herself.

Instead, Trinity had to use it to buy her own freedom out from underneath her.

All that was left in her account was a stupid six thousand dollars. The extra money that she had thought would make the difference.

It felt like a fucking punch line to the story that was her entire life.

“I paid for it,” she told them. They didn’t need to know all the details. They didn’t deserve all the details. “That’s how money actually works. You take it away and a door closes. So, I told the school to refund your money, and then I paid it myself.”

Baran’s hand flew to her mouth.

“With your medical school money?” Yolanda asked and god it sounded so outlandish. Like Trinity had a difference between school money and all the money she had.

“With my money,” Trinity’s voice cracked and she hated it. She hated that she couldn’t even stand here without shaking. “There is no medical school money or fun money or regular money. I don’t have that, it’s just money. I just have what I earned and now it’s gone.”

“Trinity—you can’t,” Baran’s hand came down from her mouth. “That’s your entire future, you can’t just give away medical school. Call them back. We can fix—”

“I fixed it! I paid for it. And now I gotta find a way to earn it again so hopefully I can even—“

Her voice cracks off because medical school seemed like a sick out of reach dream now. Another version of her life that had always been too good to be true.

“No, no.” Baran sounded genuinely distressed but Trinity just thinks good. It shouldn’t only be her with this pain. “You can’t just give away your school. We can—”

“No!” Trinity wished she could make them both stop talking. She wished she could scream, but she never had been able to. She wanted to be able to reach into her anger and present it through yelling or throwing things across the room. Instead, she had always buried it underneath her skin. “You can’t.”

“We can talk to someone. If you just let Yolanda or I—” The hope in her voice felt obscene.

“You don’t get it,” Trinity said again, louder because they kept talking, kept reaching for her with their voices because she wouldn’t let them use their hands. “You’re still doing it. We can fix it, we can talk to someone, we can, we can— everything is we can with you because you’ve never heard the word no and listened to it!”

“That’s not—”

“How long?” Trinity cut across her. “How long were you going to wait until you collected? A month? A year? Was it going to be little? Quit the boats over the summers? Stay with us? Why work when you don’t have to? And then one day I wake up and everything I have belongs to you and I can’t leave because leaving costs money and I don’t have any because you have all of it and I’m stuck in that bedroom just waiting for you to come and—”

“Trinity stop.” Yolanda stopped her before she could continue. Perhaps there was a blessing in that. There was something horrified in Yolanda’s expression, but Trinity couldn’t read anything right now. Everything was coming through a 10 year old filter that she couldn’t stop seeing. And through the filter Yolanda’s horror just looked like her mask was slipping.

“There it is,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Stop. Enough. Don’t make trouble. Don’t be difficult, Trinity. Look at everything he’s given us–” She heard herself say it and couldn’t stop, could only go faster like speed would make it end. “And you know what? At least I knew what I was getting from him. Eventually I knew exactly what it cost. But you—you two tell me I’m safe that I can sleep—” her voice cracked again. “You told me nobody needed anything from me. All while you made sure that the two things I couldn’t walk away from had your names attached to it.”

Trinity picked up her bag and headed towards the door. “Fuck both of you. I never want to see you again.”

“No, Trinity, wait,” Baran was already moving before she’d finished speaking. The sheet caught under her foot and she stumbled, nearly going down, before catching herself. “Please, please,” she said, she was reaching out for Trinity now, one hand still keeping the sheet clutched to her chest. She looked nothing like the woman she knew. She looked desperate. “You can’t leave like this, please five minutes. Let me just explain. You have to let me explain. It’s not what you think.”

“Baran,” Yolanda had grabbed Baran by her arm. She watched as Baran tried to pull free, but Yolanda held on.

“Five minutes, please. I’ll fix it. I'll find a way to fix it. I can’t–” her voice was disintegrating, the measured cadence completely gone, nothing left of the collected woman that Trinity knew. “You can’t walk out that door think we—thinking I would ever—”

The need to comfort was already crawling up Trinity’s throat, old and utterly humiliating. If she stayed another minute, she would start apologizing for the things she had said. She would explain about the rent and her mother’s face after first time he came into her room. Then they would have everything.

And she had already given them too much.

“I’m leaving,” Trinity said turning back around to walk towards the door.

Baran made a noise like the words had split her open. “No, Trinity, please. You have it all wrong.”

“Baran,” Yolanda said softly.

“No, we can’t just let her leave,” Baran sounded desperate as Yolanda’s arm stayed wrapped around her waist, holding her back. “Her future—“

“Baran,” Yolanda’s voice was stern. “Let her go.” Her voice cracked in the middle of it.

She made it to the door before standing there with her hand on the handle. She told herself not to look back, but she couldn't help herself.

Both of Yolanda’s arms were now wrapped around Baran; one across her waist and one braced at her shoulders holding her against her own body as Baran cried. They looked nothing like the women that Trinity had first seen stepping onto the yacht.

They looked like people who had just lost something, Trinity thought painfully. (She’d think about that for years, probably.)

“The refund should hit in a few days,” she said, facing the door again instead of them, before she opened the door. “I hope you had your fun.”

There was just the sound of Baran’s soft pleas for her please, we can’t let her go, Yola, her school, and Yolanda’s voice underneath it, lower, I know, let her go. The two of them were already holding each other through it. It was probably the way they had held each other through ten years of everything. They’d survive this together, too.

Trinity stepped into the hallway before the thought could undo her.

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