★An hour earlier...★
Anastasia sat alone in her room, staring blankly at the wall. Evelyn's words rang in her head like an alarm that wouldn't shut off.
Her fingers were tangled in her hair, and her mind was a chaos of doubts and fear.
"Should I talk to Mason about it?" she whispered to herself, pacing slowly. "No... no, that would be foolish. She would only twist it against me."
'I can't be the cause of chaos in the family... I know the circumstances that surrounds my being here, I can't say a word about it to him.' With restlessness evident in her eyes, she thought.
She sank onto the bed and hugged her knees, trying to breathe evenly.
"It's going to take years for me to save enough to pay that debt," she mumbled.
"And if I take help from someone else... it would just trap me again. I'm just going to have to change the way things are. Go back to how we were before."
A knock broke her thoughts.
"Who's there?" she asked quickly, wiping her eyes and fixing her expression.
