The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 13
Later, my mother told Marco that it was the first time she had truly considered the life I’d been living all those years.
She had always believed Ava was a sacred duty, a responsibility left by the dead.
She thought that being stricter with me, overlooking me, didn’t count as real harm. After all, I was her biological daughter. The Vitale family home would always be open to me.
She believed anything could be made up for later.
And so, little by little, my father and Marco had started to see my silence as normal, too.
By then, I was already on a bus to California.
The bus arrived late at night.
I checked into a youth hostel that cost thirty dollars a night.
The room was small, but it had air conditioning and a window that opened.
When the cool night air hit my face, my whole body relaxed.
At least I didn’t have to go back to that attic, a cramped space converted from a storage room.
The next day, carrying my admission papers, I became one of Westbridge’s earliest-arriving freshmen.
Student affairs helped me get settled in my dorm.
The network lab gave me a work-study position. I was responsible for organizing equipment and checking for vulnerabilities in the public test environment. I also picked up two shifts a week at the campus supermarket.
The jobs came with three meals a day and a transportation stipend.
In my first month, I managed to save over a thousand dollars.
The day I got my first paycheck, I went to the mall.
I bought a few new outfits that I picked out myself.
I also had a clerk measure me and bought bras that actually fit.
At the checkout counter, no one asked me how many permission slips I had.
The clerk only asked what color I wanted.