Snow (A Snow White Remix)

chapter two

The day after Nora's father committed suicide, the house had been empty.

Mallory's parents were there to console their daughter and their grandchild—the four of them even disappeared for lunch.

Mallory had been a wreck. Until that point, Nora had never seen her stepmother cry. So when the paramedics came to take the body, she hadn't expected to hear such giant, gasping sobs from downstairs.

Nora hid in her room under her covers. She was just... numb. As if somehow her mind and heart disconnected and weren't on speaking terms. She knew she should be devastated. She even expected some type of heart-wrenching grief.

Only there was nothing.

At first, she couldn't process it. After a few hours of sitting there in an empty house under heavy covers, she finally thought everything through.

And then she couldn't breathe.

She was alone.

Mallory wasn't her mother. Nor did she care to be. Her father had had a somewhat platonic love with her stepmother. They'd been two lost souls swimming in a sea of grief after their respective mate's loss. And somehow they had found each other and kindled a type of acquaintance love. Their loss had been their bonding factor. The bond had been strong enough that her father felt he could marry Mallory and live with her. Could start over.

Only he'd been wrong.

That had been two years ago, a week before Nora started her freshman year at Jostlin Academy. Mallory made her go to school regardless. Made her pretend nothing had happened.

Three weeks after that, Mallory called Nora into her father's study. Her stepsister Felicity was there, sitting in her mother's favorite teal chair. When Nora slipped into the room, Felicity crossed her legs and leaned back in the chair.

Nora hated her father's study. The thought of it alone made her nauseous. She couldn't look at anything—especially not the wooden truss above the fireplace. Or the new white rug underneath it. It had been her father's favorite room. And the room where—

Mallory was still in the same perfectly pressed maroon pantsuit she'd worn to the office—her father's office. Upon his passing, the board granted Mallory the promotion, and just like that, her father was replaced.

Not three weeks after his death.

The anger crawled carefully up Nora's spine just seeing Mallory in the pantsuit. Her father spent his life working on his company, Dream Records, building it from the ground up and making a name for himself. And in just three weeks, the board found someone they deemed sufficient enough to replace him.

His current wife.

"What is this?" Mallory asked as Nora walked into the room. She lifted up a simple piece of notebook paper—the only document on her desk.

Recognition immediately flowed through her. It was her homework, her first test from her Freshman Lyrics class, with her perfect score on the top in red. Next to the score, Professor Phell drew a small smiley face. Nora had been so excited about that smiley face she just about burst—the first little ounce of joy she'd had since her father's passing. And it was over something as small as a little drawing and a grade.

But that grade... It was her confirmation that she was exactly where she was meant to be. That maybe, just maybe, her father passed her a tiny smidge of talent. Something more than just his ears and the rest of his genes.

She'd been so proud of that perfect score she'd taped it to the inside of her closet door. Proud, but also afraid someone might find it.

Someone like Mallory.