Part 2: His jaw flexed.

Madison laughed softly. “Is she seriously stealing a snake?”

The snake slid toward my hand.

Not away.

Toward.

Its body was cold, lighter than I expected, and it looped around my wrist with a tired gentleness that broke something in me.

For three years, it had lived in that glass box.

For three years, I had lived in another one.

I put it carefully inside my oversized leather purse, zipped it halfway so it could breathe, and walked toward the bedroom door.

Grant stumbled out of bed, wrapping the sheet around his waist. “Lena, don’t be stupid.”

I paused.

Behind me, the room smelled like perfume, rain, and expensive cowardice.

“You taught me something tonight,” I said. “When a man calls a living thing useless, he usually means it stopped serving him.”

Then I left.

The elevator doors closed on Grant’s shouting and Madison’s laughter.

I didn’t cry until I was back in my apartment.

My place in Tacoma was small, the kind of one-bedroom where the heater rattled and the kitchen drawer stuck unless you pulled it at an angle. The paint near the window had bubbled from old moisture, and the neighbor upstairs walked like he was trying to punish the floor.

But it was mine.

No marble counters. No skyline view. No man telling me I was too sensitive while bleeding me dry.

I set my purse on the bed and unzipped it.

The white snake emerged slowly, tongue flicking, its head rising as if surveying a kingdom. It looked absurdly regal on my thrift-store quilt.

“Well,” I whispered, wiping my face with my sleeve, “welcome to rock bottom.”

The snake tilted its head.

I laughed once, brokenly. “You too, huh?”

I didn’t know anything about snakes, so I spent an hour researching emergency care. I found a clean plastic storage bin, lined it with towels, set up a heat source as safely as I could, and placed a shallow dish of water inside. The snake ignored the water at first, then lowered its head and drank for so long my throat tightened.

“You poor thing,” I said.

It looked up at me again.

That was when I noticed the mark.

On the top of its head, faint beneath the white scales, was a pattern like a silver crescent wrapped around a tiny star.

I leaned closer.

The snake watched me without blinking.

“Okay,” I murmured. “That’s unusual.”

I should have gone to sleep.

Instead, because heartbreak makes fools and documentarians of us all, I took out my phone and recorded a short video.

In it, my voice sounded hoarse.

“Tonight I caught my boyfriend cheating, broke up with him, and accidentally stole the neglected white snake he kept on his balcony. I don’t know what I’m doing, but she was freezing and thirsty, so… meet Pearl, I guess.”

I posted it to TikTok with the caption:

I left the man. Took the snake. No regrets.

Then I fell asleep with the phone on my chest…..

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