CHAPTER 40 TAMIKA's POV

The phone was heavy in my hand, as I was about to make the one call I had been avoiding for a long time now.

Each time the phone buzzed took me back to that feeling of days when I would be calling for help and no one would come through. It had been the darkest period of my life before I had been about to break out as a star in what I did.

“You useless piece of crap…” the brutal words of my stepmother stung me mercilessly as I was about to be pushed into a world of numerous uncertainties. “There's no need for us keeping you here, you're like unwanted furniture which no one would ever want to keep by them…”

What stung even more painfully was the fact that my father had stood right there and did nothing about what his new wife was doing to the only surviving child of his first love.

At that point, I was wondering what exactly I could have done wrong to deserve what was happening to me. I had always been an ass-kisser for her daughter— my stepsister, Tara.

I had been warned by her cru