Lydia has been her sister's blood donor since childhood, a spare part kept close and kept small. Her family treats the needle as routine, and Ethan, the boy she trusted most, stands with them when it counts against her.
So Lydia does the one thing nobody planned for: she leaves. She trains, tests, and climbs until she becomes the youngest astronaut in American history, a woman whose name gets printed above her family's reach. From orbit she is untouchable. On the ground, the people who used her are left with the version of her they discarded, and the slow realization of what they traded away.
