They Told Me To Be Quiet. So I Disappeared.

Poppy has survived seven foster homes, and she learned early that silence means being sent away. When her biological mother brings her into the powerful Moretti family at seventeen, she talks to everyone she meets, collecting names, birthdays and secrets within minutes. Her stepsister Bianca calls it manipulation; her stepbrother Luca calls it an addiction to attention.

Luca orders St. Augustine Academy, the elite school the Morettis fund, to enforce a 72-Hour Social Silence Protocol: no student, teacher or staff member may speak to her, and her messages are filtered. Her mother promises that if she endures the three days, she will not be sent away again. Then Bianca switches the trail marker on Poppy's backpack during the leadership retreat, sending her down an abandoned path.

Poppy falls forty-five feet into a flooded smuggling tunnel, her leg shattered beneath concrete. She calls everyone she knows ninety-nine times. No one answers.