The day I left Bernardo Del Valle, I thought the worst thing I had lost was three years of my life.
I was wrong.
The worst thing I lost was the belief that ordinary rules still applied to me.
My name is Teresa Morgan, and I used to be the kind of woman who made sensible choices because chaos had never done me any favors.
I paid rent on time.
I saved receipts.
I kept emergency cash folded behind my driver’s license.
I had a dentist in Queens, a favorite bodega that knew my coffee order, and one very unglamorous talent for talking myself out of panic in public places.
Then I met Bernardo Del Valle at a charity rooftop party in Manhattan, and for a while, I mistook proximity to wealth for proof that my life was finally opening up.
He was beautiful in the polished way expensive men become beautiful.
Tailored suits.
Low voice.
Dark eyes that made women lean in before they realized he had not said anything kind.
His family name moved ahead of him like a private security detail.
Restaurant managers smiled before seeing his reservation.
Doormen straightened.
Older women at Greenwich dinners lowered their voices when they said Del Valle, as though the last name itself had inherited money.
At first, I thought Bernardo’s confidence meant he knew how to love without fear.
Later, I understood that he simply never expected to lose anything he considered his.
For three years, I gave him the softest parts of myself.
I learned which shirt he preferred for board meetings.
I remembered that his mother hated white lilies but loved gardenias.
I packed his passport before trips because he always forgot it and always blamed the staff.
I sat through charity galas where women with diamonds on their wrists asked me what I did, then stopped listening halfway through the answer.
I told myself love required patience.
What I really meant was that leaving required courage, and I had misplaced mine.
The first time I saw the snake, she was curled inside a glass terrarium on Bernardo’s balcony.
The penthouse was all clean lines and cold surfaces, Italian marble underfoot, floor-to-ceiling windows, a kitchen that looked designed for chefs who would never be allowed to leave fingerprints.
The balcony overlooked Manhattan like a threat.
In the corner sat the terrarium, dusty and half-hidden behind a sculptural planter.
Inside, under a heat lamp that was not plugged in, lay a snow-white snake.
She looked too delicate for the neglect around her.
Her body was coiled tightly, her head tucked near herself, as if even sleep required defense.
“Whose snake is that?” I asked.
Bernardo barely lifted his eyes from his phone.
“My grandfather’s,” he said.
He said it the way some men say old furniture.
“The old man was obsessed with it before he died. It’s useless, dirty, and honestly creepy. Don’t touch it.”
I should have listened to the way he said useless.
People tell you what they are long before they hurt you.
They just say it while holding flowers, opening doors, or laughing across a table, and you convince yourself contempt sounds different when it is not aimed at you.
A few weeks later, at a family dinner in Greenwich, Bernardo’s mother told me the rest.
Her name was Isadora Del Valle, and she wore grief like jewelry.
Everything about her looked arranged: pearl earrings, smooth silver hair, a burgundy silk blouse, hands folded near her wineglass with the calm of a woman who had never needed to raise her voice.
Bernardo had left the table to take a call.
His father was discussing property taxes with a cousin.
Isadora looked at me, then toward the dark windows where the Del Valle estate grounds disappeared into winter.
“My husband’s father loved that creature more than he loved most of his blood,” she said.
I gave an uncertain smile.
“The snake?”
She did not smile back.
“On his deathbed, he made Bernardo promise to protect her with his life.”
Then she repeated the sentence that later came back to me like a curse.
“She is worth more than every dollar this family has ever made.”
At the time, I thought rich families enjoyed dramatizing inheritance.
Old portraits.
Private jokes.
Superstitions passed down over wine.
I did not yet know that the Del Valles did not keep traditions because they believed in them.
They kept traditions because they were afraid of what would happen if they stopped.
Bernardo did stop.
He ignored the terrarium.
He forgot the heat lamp.
He complained if I asked whether snakes needed checkups.
When I bought a temperature gauge and clipped it to the glass, he laughed.
“Teresa,” he said, “you are not seriously mothering my dead grandfather’s snake.”
I should have heard the warning in that too.
Some men can watch you care for something helpless and still decide the tenderness is the embarrassing part.
Then Vivian Blake arrived.
She was Bernardo’s new marketing director, though the title never explained the way she moved through his life.
Vivian was the kind of woman who understood lighting, timing, and proximity.
At parties, she stood close enough for people to notice, but not close enough to accuse.
She laughed at Bernardo’s jokes a second too early.
She touched his sleeve when she wanted his attention.
At the last company gala, she wore a silver dress that caught every chandelier reflection in the room.
I wore navy and told myself not to be insecure.
Bernardo introduced me as his girlfriend.
He introduced Vivian as brilliant.
There are humiliations that do not announce themselves.
They accumulate quietly.
A glance.
A pause.
A hand withdrawn too late.
By the time the truth arrives, part of you has already packed.
The next morning, I went to Bernardo’s penthouse earlier than planned because he had left a folder in my bag.
It was 10:14 a.m. on a gray Thursday in November.
I remember the time because I had checked my phone in the elevator, deciding whether to pick up coffee for both of us.
The hallway outside his bedroom smelled faintly of expensive detergent and his cologne.
The door was not fully closed.
I pushed it open.
Vivian was in his bed.
Bernardo was beside her.
The sheets beneath them were the same white sheets I had washed and ironed the morning before.
For a second, my mind refused the image.
It tried to turn the scene into anything else.
A mistake.
A misunderstanding.
A nightmare I could wake from if I blinked hard enough.
Then Vivian pulled the sheet against her chest and smiled.
Not embarrassed.
Not guilty.
Almost pleased.
Bernardo sat up with irritation on his face.
“Teresa?” he said.
“What are you doing here?”
That was the moment something inside me went very still.
I had always imagined that betrayal would make me loud.
I thought I would scream, cry, throw something, demand reasons that would only insult me more.
Instead, my body became calm in a way that frightened me.
I looked at Vivian.
I looked at Bernardo.
Then I looked at the balcony.
The white snake had lifted her head inside the dirty terrarium.
She was staring at me.
I know how that sounds.
I know what people said later, that I imagined meaning because I was heartbroken, that a snake cannot look at a person and understand abandonment.
Maybe ordinary snakes cannot.
But she looked at me like something trapped recognizes another trapped thing.
Bernardo sighed.
“Teresa, don’t be dramatic.”
Vivian’s smile widened by half an inch.
“We’re done,” I said.
Bernardo shrugged.
“Fine. If that’s what you want.”
If that was what I wanted.
As if fidelity had been a menu item I had declined.
As if three years had been a lease with an early termination fee.
I walked to the balcony door.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I did not answer.
The terrarium lid scraped softly when I opened it.
The sound was small, but the room changed around it.
Vivian stopped smiling.
Bernardo stood up.
“Teresa,” he said, sharper now. “Do not touch that thing.”
That thing.
The snake’s body was cold when I lifted her.
She did not strike.
She did not recoil.
She slid into my palm as if she had been waiting for someone to make a decision on her behalf.
I put her gently inside my purse and zipped it halfway so she could breathe.
Bernardo stared at me, naked anger finally breaking through his bored rich-boy face.
“You cannot just take things from my apartment.”
I looked at the bed, at Vivian, at the white sheets, at his open mouth.
“Watch me.”
Then I left.
The elevator ride down was silent except for my own breathing and the faint rustle inside my purse.
The mirrored walls showed me a woman I barely recognized.
Hair too neat for what had just happened.
Eyes dry.
One hand clenched so tight around the purse strap that my knuckles had gone white.
I expected to break when I reached the lobby.
I did not.
I walked through the glass doors into the November air and kept walking until the city swallowed the building behind me.
My apartment in Queens looked smaller that night than it ever had before.
The radiator hissed under the window.
The floorboards complained when I crossed them.
My thrift-store lamp made the room yellow and ordinary, which should have comforted me but did not.
I placed the snake on my nightstand.
She curled near my phone.
“You and me both,” I whispered.
“Just two abandoned girls.”
She tilted her head.
I told myself it meant nothing.
Then I spent the next hour searching for reptile care like a woman trying to prove she had stolen responsibly.
At 11:48 p.m., I found an emergency exotic pet clinic in Brooklyn.
At 12:06 a.m., I called a 24-hour pet store in Astoria and asked what an albino snake needed if it had been neglected.
The man on the phone told me frozen mice, proper heat, a secure enclosure, and definitely not whatever I was describing from Bernardo’s balcony.
At 12:19 a.m., I wrote “frozen mouse, heat pad, enclosure clips” on the back of an unpaid Con Edison envelope.
That envelope later became the first thing I showed people when they accused me of stealing for attention.
I had not been chasing a viral moment.
I had been trying to keep something alive.
Near 2 a.m., exhaustion finally pinned me to the mattress.
I cried then, but quietly.
Not the cinematic kind of crying.
No shaking shoulders in a mirror.
Just tears sliding into my hair while I stared at the ceiling and thought about all the meals I had cooked for a man who could replace me before I even left the room.
Just as I was falling asleep, something cold touched my leg.
My eyes flew open.
The snake was coiled around my thigh.
My entire body locked.
Her grip was firm but not crushing.
Her scales were icy against my skin.
She did not seem to be attacking me.
She seemed to be holding on.
“Okay,” I whispered.
My voice sounded ridiculous in the dark.
“We are going to need boundaries.”
She released me and slid back toward the nightstand.
I should have called animal control.
I should have put her in a box, called Bernardo, and ended the strangeness before it became my life.
Instead, heartbroken and sleep-starved, I picked up my phone and recorded a twelve-second video.
The caption was meant to be a joke.
“The day I dumped my cheating boyfriend, I stole his snake.”
I had a few hundred followers.
Most were old coworkers, cousins, and people who watched my apartment cooking videos.
By morning, my phone was vibrating so hard it slid off the nightstand.
3.2 million views.
I thought the app had glitched.
Then I opened the comments.
“That is NOT a normal albino snake.”
“Girl, do you even know what you took?”
“Delete this before his family finds you.”
“Why does that snake look like it knows tax law and ancient curses?”
I laughed at that one because fear had not fully arrived yet.
Then a comment appeared that stopped me cold.
“You didn’t steal his pet. You stole the Del Valle ancestor.”
I screenshotted it at 8:43 a.m.
By 8:44, the comment had vanished.
I searched the username.
Gone.
I searched Del Valle ancestor.
Most results were useless.
Old society-page articles.
A wedding announcement.
An archived mention of a Del Valle Foundation gala.
Then I found a forum thread cached under an old occult history site.
The post was dated nine years earlier.
It mentioned a white serpent guarded by a New York banking family.
It mentioned a chapel under an estate.
It mentioned three thousand years.
I closed the tab so quickly my hands shook.
Then I turned toward the nightstand.
The snake was gone.
Panic hit me in a clean, practical sequence.
Blankets first.
Pillows next.
Under the bed.
Behind the radiator.
Inside my laundry basket.
I was on my knees, one hand under the dresser, when a white head appeared from beneath my pillow.
I nearly screamed.
Then I picked her up.
She had grown.
Not dramatically enough for someone else to believe me.
Enough for my hands to know.
The night before, she had been about the length of my forearm.
Now she was heavier, thicker, smoother in a way that made my skin prickle.
“What did you eat?” I whispered.
She only watched me.
That was when Bernardo called.
I almost let it ring out.
Curiosity answered before dignity could stop me.
“Teresa,” he snapped. “Do you have the snake?”
I looked at her curled around my wrist.
“Yes.”
“You need to bring it back. Now.”
I laughed once.
It did not sound like me.
“Funny. Yesterday it was dirty and useless.”
“My mother found out it’s gone,” he said.
There it was.
Not remorse.
Not concern.
His mother.
“She says it belonged to my grandfather. It can’t leave the family.”
“Then maybe your family should have taken care of her.”
“You don’t understand what you’re messing with.”
“No,” I said.
The snake lifted her head toward his voice.
“I think I understand perfectly. She chose me.”
I hung up before he could answer.
That sentence felt good for about four seconds.
Then I realized I had no idea whether it was true.
That afternoon, I went to the pet store in Astoria and bought the frozen mouse, the heat pad, enclosure clips, and a small digital thermometer.
I kept the receipt.
I still have it.
Cashier: Miguel.
Time: 1:32 p.m.
Total: $47.18.
It became one more ridiculous artifact in the paper trail of my life becoming impossible.
When I got home, I warmed the mouse the way the employee had told me.
The snake did not even glance at it.
I was eating an apple because I had forgotten lunch.
She leaned forward and took a neat bite from the fruit in my hand.
I froze.
A snake.
Eating fruit.
Of course, I posted it.
I wish I could say I did not.
I wish I could say common sense finally overcame heartbreak and curiosity.
But by then, millions of people were watching, Bernardo was calling every twenty minutes, and the only thing that made me feel less alone was the comment section screaming with me.
Within an hour, the apple video passed 2 million views.
The tone changed.
The jokes vanished.
“Snakes don’t eat apples.”
“That’s not a snake.”
“Delete this before the wrong people find you.”
Then another comment appeared for only a few seconds.
I screenshotted it at 4:09 p.m.
“After three thousand years… she has finally eaten again.”
That night, I stacked a chair under my apartment doorknob.
I locked the window twice.
I pushed the dresser two inches closer to the wall because there was a gap behind it just wide enough for fear to invent things.
The snake slept in a plastic storage bin with air holes because I did not yet have a proper enclosure.
I put the bin on the nightstand.
Then I lay awake listening to the radiator hiss.
At 2:17 a.m., cold air hit my face.
My eyes opened.
The window was up.
The chair was still under the door.
The nightstand bin was empty.
A man sat on my windowsill.
Moonlight covered him in silver.
He had pale skin, long black hair, and eyes that glowed yellow-green in a way no human eyes should glow.
He wore no shirt.
Only my white bedsheet wrapped loosely around his waist.
I could not move.
He tilted his head.
Exactly the way the snake did.
“Cold,” he said.
His voice was low enough that I felt it in my chest before I understood the word.
My eyes shot to the nightstand.
The snake was gone.
When I looked back, he smiled.
Beautiful.
Terrifying.
Not human.
“Who are you?” I shouted.
I grabbed the nearest object, which turned out to be a pillow, and threw it at him.
He caught it midair without blinking.
“You took me from that glass prison,” he said.
He stepped down from the sill with a grace that made my stomach turn.
“According to human rules, that means you are responsible for me now.”
“I saved you.”
“I know.”
He said it softly.
That was worse.
I backed up until my spine hit the wall.
My heart was beating so hard I could hear it.
Outside, a siren passed somewhere far away, ordinary city noise moving through an impossible room.
“For three thousand years,” he said, “you are the first human who showed me kindness.”
“What are you?”
He did not answer at first.
He looked around my apartment instead.
At the cracked phone screen.
At the unpaid envelope.
At the apple on the nightstand with one precise bite missing.
At the terrarium supplies still inside their plastic bag.
Then he looked back at me, and I saw something beneath the danger that I had not expected.
Grief.
Not human grief, maybe.
Not soft grief.
But something old and bruised and awake.
He leaned toward my neck, inhaled softly, and let out a quiet hiss.
Every nerve in my body went still.
“Now they will come for you,” he whispered.
Then someone knocked three times.
The sound was not loud.
It did not have to be.
Three soft knocks on an apartment door at 2:23 a.m. can carry more violence than a shout.
The man turned toward the door.
His face changed completely.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
“Do not answer,” he said.
From the hallway came Bernardo’s voice.
“Teresa. Open the door.”
I almost laughed because the absurdity of it was too much.
My cheating ex-boyfriend was outside my Queens apartment while an ancient snake-man in my bedsheet stood between me and the door.
I had reached a level of crisis where language no longer felt equipped.
Then paper slid under the door.
A thick cream envelope crossed the floorboards and stopped near my bare foot.
The red wax seal on the back carried the Del Valle crest.
The man saw it and went still.
That was the first time I saw fear on him.
I picked up the envelope before he could stop me.
On the front, written in black ink, was my full name.
Teresa Morgan.
Under it were three words.
Keeper by Theft.
Bernardo spoke again from the hallway.
“My mother said if you opened that terrarium, the contract transferred.”
Contract.
The word made my mouth go dry.
The man beside the window closed his eyes briefly, as if he had been hoping humans had forgotten that part.
Then another voice came from the hallway.
Older.
Colder.
Isadora Del Valle.
“Ask him what happens to the keeper when the family comes to collect.”
The man whispered my name.
It sounded like an apology.
I opened the envelope.
Inside was a single page, folded once.
The paper was thick enough to feel like cloth.
At the top was the Del Valle crest.
Beneath it, in formal language that looked older than the ink should have been, was a declaration of custodianship.
I saw my name on the third line.
I saw Bernardo’s grandfather’s name below it.
I saw a date from 1911.
Then I saw another date handwritten in the margin.
November 16.
Today.
My hands started shaking.
“What is this?” I asked.
The man did not answer.
He was staring at the door like he could see through it.
Bernardo knocked again.
“Teresa, give him back and this can still be fixed.”
Him.
Not it.
Not the snake.
Him.
The man smiled then, but there was nothing gentle in it.
“They never told him,” he said.
“Told him what?”
“That I was never theirs.”
Behind the door, Isadora said something in a language I did not recognize.
The hallway light flickered.
The red wax seal on the envelope cracked down the middle without anyone touching it.
My apartment became colder.
The man stepped between me and the door.
For the first time since he had appeared, I noticed faint markings rising beneath the skin along his spine, pale gold lines like old script surfacing under water.
He looked back at me.
“If they cross this threshold,” he said, “do not speak your name.”
That was the moment my fear sharpened into something else.
I had spent three years letting Bernardo decide the shape of rooms around me.
Where I stood.
When I smiled.
What I tolerated.
Now he was outside my door with his mother, trying to turn my one act of rescue into another contract I had not agreed to sign.
I folded the paper once.
Then I walked to the door.
The man caught my wrist.
His hand was cold, but his grip was careful.
“Teresa.”
I looked at him.
“You said human rules make me responsible for you now.”
“Yes.”
“Then here is a human rule.”
I pulled my wrist free.
“Nobody gets to collect someone from my apartment like property.”
I removed the chair from beneath the doorknob.
Outside, Bernardo went silent.
I opened the door as far as the chain would allow.
Bernardo stood in the hallway wearing the same coat he had worn to the gala.
Behind him stood Isadora, perfectly dressed at 2:30 in the morning, her silver hair smooth, her face calm, her eyes fixed not on me but on the man behind my shoulder.
For once, Bernardo did not look bored.
He looked young.
Frightened.
Human.
Isadora looked at the envelope in my hand.
Then at my face.
“You have no idea what you invited into your life,” she said.
I thought about the terrarium.
The unplugged heat lamp.
The way the snake had curled around herself for years in a glass prison while everyone with power called her useless.
I thought about myself standing in Bernardo’s bedroom while Vivian smiled from my sheets.
For one strange second, the whole thing became simple.
“I know exactly what I invited in,” I said.
“Something you abandoned.”
Isadora’s expression cracked.
Not much.
Enough.
The man behind me inhaled sharply.
The hallway lights flickered again, stronger this time.
A neighbor’s door opened at the far end of the hall.
Mrs. Alvarez from 4B peeked out in her robe, curlers in her hair, one hand holding a wooden spoon like a weapon.
“What is going on?” she demanded.
It should have been ridiculous.
It saved me.
Because the Del Valles could threaten me in private, but they could not perform ancient family horror under fluorescent hallway lights while a Puerto Rican grandmother with excellent hearing watched from six doors down.
Isadora stepped back first.
Bernardo followed.
“This is not over,” his mother said.
“No,” I replied.
My voice was steadier than I felt.
“It is documented now.”
I lifted my phone.
The screen was recording.
I had started it before opening the door.
Bernardo saw the red dot and went pale.
A practical woman survives by making records.
Screenshots.
Receipts.
Timestamps.
Video when the powerful come knocking and expect silence to serve them.
Isadora looked at me as if I had done something vulgar.
Then she smiled.
“You think evidence protects you from old debts.”
The man behind me spoke for the first time.
“She has no debt.”
His voice changed the hallway.
Mrs. Alvarez crossed herself.
Bernardo flinched.
Isadora’s smile vanished.
“She gave kindness freely,” he said.
“That cannot be claimed by contract.”
For a moment, nobody moved.
Then Isadora turned and walked toward the elevator.
Bernardo hesitated long enough to look at me once.
Whatever he saw on my face made him follow her without another word.
I closed the door.
The chain rattled softly.
The room behind me felt too bright, too cold, too real.
The man stood near the nightstand, one hand on the edge of the dirty terrarium.
“What is your name?” I asked.
He looked down.
“You would not be able to say it correctly.”
“Try me.”
For the first time, he looked almost amused.
Then he gave me a name that sounded like wind moving through stone.
I failed immediately.
He closed his eyes as if pained.
“Call me Ari,” he said.
Ari stayed in my apartment until dawn.
Not in my bed.
Not touching me.
Not looming like a threat.
He sat on the floor beside the radiator with the bedsheet wrapped around him, eating apple slices from a chipped plate and watching the city brighten through my window.
I asked questions.
He answered some.
He had been bound to the Del Valle line long before the family carried that name.
He had been kept, displayed, hidden, worshiped, feared, and neglected depending on which generation had control of him.
Bernardo’s grandfather had been the last one who understood that guarding Ari was not ownership.
After the old man died, the family kept the symbol and ignored the being.
Ari had stopped eating.
Stopped speaking.
Stopped shifting.
Until I opened the glass.
Until I fed him fruit.
Until I called him abandoned and meant us both.
By 7:12 a.m., I had a folder on my laptop labeled DEL VALLE.
Inside were the TikTok screenshots, the vanished comments, the pet store receipt, the envelope scans, and the hallway video.
By 8:03 a.m., I had sent copies to myself, my sister, and a lawyer I had once helped with catering invoices during a nonprofit event.
By 9:30 a.m., Bernardo had texted me fourteen times.
None included an apology.
That told me everything.
The internet did what the internet does.
It turned me into a villain, then a heroine, then a liar, then a meme, then a woman people argued about as if I had ceased being real.
Some said I stole property.
Some said I rescued a pet.
Some said the man in the hallway video was special effects.
Some paused the footage and circled the moment his eyes reflected green when the elevator doors opened.
I stopped reading after someone found the old Del Valle chapel story and posted photos of a sealed underground door on the Greenwich estate.
The comments became noise.
My life became small again by necessity.
Lock the door.
Document everything.
Feed Ari apples.
Buy him clothes, because a supernatural being in a bedsheet attracts attention even in Queens.
Three days later, a courier delivered a letter from the Del Valle family attorney demanding the return of “ancestral property.”
My lawyer replied with three attachments.
The hallway video.
The envelope bearing my name.
A still frame of Ari in human form, standing behind me while Isadora referred to him as something to collect.
The phrase ancestral property disappeared from their next letter.
That was the beginning of the end.
Not because the law knew what to do with Ari.
It did not.
But because the Del Valles knew what exposure could do to a family whose power depended on people staying too embarrassed, too frightened, or too dependent to speak clearly.
They offered money.
I refused.
They offered silence.
I laughed.
They offered to take Ari back “for his own protection.”
He read that line and snapped the letter in half without moving from the kitchen chair.
In the weeks that followed, I learned that freedom does not always arrive like victory.
Sometimes it arrives like paperwork.
Changed locks.
Legal notices.
A new phone number.
A friend sleeping on your couch because you are too proud to admit you are afraid of the dark.
Sometimes freedom is an ancient being learning how to use a toaster and a woman learning that rescue does not require self-destruction.
Ari eventually left my apartment.
Not because the Del Valles took him.
Because he chose to.
On a cold morning in December, he stood by my window wearing a black sweater I had bought him from a thrift shop and looked at the city as if it were both new and painfully familiar.
“I do not belong in anyone’s glass,” he said.
“No,” I told him.
“You don’t.”
He touched the windowsill once.
Then he was gone before the kettle finished boiling.
I still find white scales sometimes in impossible places.
Inside a book.
Near the radiator.
Once, tucked into the pocket of the coat I wore the day I left Bernardo’s penthouse.
Maybe they are signs.
Maybe they are reminders.
Maybe old magic sheds slowly.
Bernardo married Vivian eight months later.
I saw the announcement because people sent it to me with skull emojis and dramatic commentary.
I did not reply.
Isadora never contacted me again directly.
Her lawyers did, twice, then stopped when mine asked whether she wanted to explain Keeper by Theft under oath.
As for me, I still live in Queens.
I still keep receipts.
I still pay rent on time.
But I no longer confuse being chosen by a powerful man with being valued.
That is a lesson I wish I had learned before the terrarium, before the bedroom, before 3.2 million strangers told me I had stolen something that wasn’t human.
Still, sometimes I think about that night and the way the snake curled around my thigh, not to hurt me, but to hold on.
I think about how many women have mistaken neglect for patience because the room was beautiful and the man who owned it was rich.
I think about the sentence I whispered before I knew it would change everything.
Just two abandoned girls.
Only one of us had scales.
And both of us deserved to leave the glass.