Opening
Under crushing academic pressure, Addie Severson cheats on a midterm and spirals into a web of blackmail, shame, and impulsive revenge. Kenzie Montgomery pounces, Eve Bennett lowers the hammer, and Nate Bennett quietly pulls the strings—while Hudson Jankowski remains the secret Eve can’t quit. What begins as a single bad decision explodes into a chain of manipulation, betrayal, and near-disaster.
What Happens
Chapter 31: Addie
Addie faces a math midterm she knows she can’t pass. Her old lifelines—tutors Hudson Jankowski and Art Tuttle, and any chance of paying for new help—are gone. From her desk, she sees Kyle Lewis’s answer sheet, the one belonging to the kid who never misses. She wrestles with herself for a beat, then copies several multiple-choice answers. The goal isn’t glory—just survival.
The victory curdles immediately. As the bell rings, Kenzie corners her and coolly reveals she watched the cheating. When Addie pleads, Kenzie names her price: get on all fours in English class and lick the floor for sixty seconds. Addie, sickened and thinking of Nate watching, refuses. Kenzie shrugs: she’ll have a “little talk” with Mrs. Bennett. As Kenzie strolls away, Addie trembles—afraid of exposure, and of what Kenzie might know about Hudson and the truth surrounding her father’s death.
Chapter 32: Addie
In English, a note arrives for Addie. Mr. Bennett reads it first, his eyes tightening, then passes it on. Eve wants to see her after class. Nate asks if she’s okay, soft-voiced and attentive, and the gentleness almost undoes her. Addie lies. She won’t let him see her as a cheat.
Eve’s meeting is swift and cutting. She lays Addie’s test beside Kyle’s—the patterns line up, the case is clear—and accuses her of copying. Addie can only apologize. Eve says she’ll report the incident to the principal in the morning. The thought of official punishment, her mother’s shame, and worse—Nate’s disappointment—crushes Addie. Leaving the room, her dread hardens into rage. She refuses to be Kenzie’s doormat again and vows payback, a pivot toward action that reshapes her from passive target to would-be avenger.
Chapter 33: Eve
Eve comes home to find Nate there early, unusually affectionate. He kisses her like he used to, guides her upstairs, and the chemistry is electric. In the rosy afterglow, he casually asks about the note for Addie. Eve explains the cheating and her plan to report it.
Nate reframes it as panic, not malice. He questions the evidence, points to what Addie has endured, invokes Art Tuttle, and insists none of that is her fault. Eve’s professional certainty softens under his gentle logic—and the intimacy they just shared. She agrees not to go to the principal, settling on a zero and a warning. When Nate heads to the shower, a Snapflash message pings from “Jay”—Hudson—asking to see her. Doubt flickers: Did Nate just use sex to steer her? She pushes it aside by comparing him with Hudson’s seemingly genuine care. She replies, “I’ll be there,” recommitting to a clandestine relationship she knows is dangerous.
Chapter 34: Addie
Still burning with revenge, Addie bikes to Kenzie’s neighborhood and slips into the Montgomerys’ house using a key she filched weeks ago. The sleek kitchen, the curated furniture, the quiet luxury—it stings. Upstairs, she finds Kenzie’s immaculate, pink bedroom. At the desk sits a love note from Hudson. To her surprise, jealousy barely flares; her fantasies have migrated entirely to Mr. Bennett. The shame of him learning she cheated eclipses everything.
Anger spikes. She grabs a ceramic bird Kenzie made and smashes it against the floor. The crack is sharp; the satisfaction is fleeting. In Kenzie’s vast closet, Addie touches designer fabrics, toys with stealing a pink top, and labels it “decluttering.” Before she decides, a crash downstairs ruptures the silence.
Chapter 35: Addie
Addie freezes, convinced someone is home. Getting caught inside Kenzie’s house would be catastrophic. She abandons the closet, tiptoes to the stairs, pulse pounding, rehearsing lies that won’t work.
In the kitchen, the intruder reveals itself: a fluffy white cat beside a shattered water pitcher. Relief surges through her. The bravado evaporates. This isn’t who she is—or she can’t force herself to be. She leaves the house and, at the door, tosses Kenzie’s keys back into the closet, cutting off her own path to further vengeance. The attempted revenge fizzles into a narrow escape and a sobering truth about what she can and can’t do.
Character Development
These chapters push everyone past their facades, revealing fault lines between what they want and what they’ll risk to get it.
- Addie Severson: Desperation nudges her across legal and moral lines—cheating, breaking and entering—before fear and conscience pull her back. Her infatuation shifts fully from Hudson to Nate, deepening both her shame and vulnerability.
- Eve Bennett: Her professional backbone bends under emotional pressure. Nate’s charm and timing weaken her resolve, and her choice to keep seeing Hudson exposes a craving for genuine affection—and a dawning unease about her marriage.
- Nate Bennett: He perfects a soft-power strategy: intimacy, empathy, and reason as tools of control. Protecting Addie becomes the rationale, but the pattern reveals something more predatory behind his caring-teacher persona.
- Kenzie Montgomery: Her cruelty escalates from insults to calculated humiliation. The blackmail isn’t about leverage; it’s about domination, stoking the cycle that pushes Addie toward recklessness.
Themes & Symbols
The engine of these chapters is layered deceit and pressure. Lies of convenience—cheating on a test, hiding an affair, masking intentions with intimacy—feed on one another until motive and truth blur. The result is a study in power: who has it, how they wield it, and what they justify to keep it. That spiral animates Deception and Manipulation, where Nate’s persuasion and timing eclipse even Kenzie’s textbook bullying, and Addie’s own deception catalyzes her downfall.
Addie’s pivot to retaliation spotlights Revenge and Justice: she frames payback as fairness, but her break-in exposes the gulf between fantasy and consequence. At home, marital dynamics showcase Abuse of Power and Predatory Behavior: Nate deploys sex and sympathy to shape Eve’s professional choices, blurring boundaries and exploiting her longing for closeness. The gap between surface kindness and underlying motive crystallizes the novel’s Appearance vs. Reality tension.
Symbols:
- Kenzie’s House: A shrine to stability and privilege that magnifies Addie’s resentment; trespassing is both rebellion and a plea to be seen.
- The Shattered Ceramic Bird: A handmade emblem of Kenzie’s curated perfection. Breaking it momentarily grants Addie control—but doesn’t heal anything, underscoring the hollowness of petty revenge.
Key Quotes
“I’ll be having a little talk with Mrs. Bennett.”
Kenzie’s threat weaponizes institutional authority without lifting a finger. The line turns Eve into a tool of humiliation, showing how bullying thrives by manipulating systems rather than brute force.
“I’ll be there.”
Eve’s message to “Jay” is small but seismic. It marks her conscious choice to sustain the affair even after a tender moment with her husband, highlighting the split between what she yearns for and what she knows is right.
“But in the end, it isn’t about him at all. It’s about the guy on the other end of this conversation. Jay scraped together enough money to buy me a beautiful pair of shoes for my birthday when my own husband got me nothing. I’ve never had to question if he had an ulterior motive.”
Eve’s narration reveals piercing irony. She senses Nate’s ulterior motives but misreads their target, while crediting Hudson with pure devotion—oblivious to the ethical breach and its consequences. The quote captures how love, need, and denial distort judgment.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters escalate private mistakes into entangling consequences. Addie’s cheating triggers Kenzie’s blackmail, which forces Eve’s intervention, which invites Nate’s manipulation—a chain reaction that tightens every character’s bind. Nate’s success in steering Eve confirms the threat he poses beneath his benevolent exterior, while Eve’s decision to keep seeing Hudson ensures the secret world shadowing the school persists. The anticlimax of the cat resets the immediate danger but leaves the larger storms—exposure, obsession, and retaliation—gathering force.