Chapter 6: One Dinner

I don’t sleep.

I lie on the couch in the changing room staring at the ceiling until my alarm goes off at seven, and when I reach for my phone there are seventeen missed calls. Three from Zara. Two from Jace. Twelve from numbers I don’t recognise, probably people from the party who want to talk about what happened, who want to be the ones to tell someone else first. I delete all of them without listening to a single one.

Then I sit up and immediately regret it.

Everything hurts. My thighs, my core, the place between my legs that has never hurt like this before and has no business hurting like this now. I sit very still for a moment and just breathe, trying to figure out what I actually feel about last night, and coming up with nothing clean. Not numb exactly. More like there’s too much of everything and none of it has settled into a shape I can name yet. I did something I can’t undo with someone I’m supposed to hate, and my body remembers every second of it in a language my brain can’t translate, and I genuinely don’t know what to do with that.

So I do the only thing that’s ever worked. I get up. I move.

I need my things from Zara’s apartment. I need to figure out where I’m going to sleep now that I can’t go back there, and I can’t go home either because Marco knows where I live and has shown up before when a payment was late. Three months ago I started staying at Zara’s specifically to avoid him. But now that option is gone too, and I’m standing here in yesterday’s clothes with my entire life suddenly requiring restructuring before eight in the morning.

I grab my bag and go.

Zara’s complex is twenty minutes from campus. I park in the visitor spot and sit in the car for a few minutes, not because I need to work out what to say but because I need to make sure I can say it without falling apart. She betrayed me. She chose him over me and then she watched me get humiliated in that hallway and said nothing, and I need my things, and that’s the entire scope of what this visit is.

I get out. Knock.

She answers immediately, like she’s been sitting on the other side of the door all night. Her eyes are red and swollen and she looks like she hasn’t slept either, and some small, traitorous part of me wants to feel something about that. I don’t let it.

“Layla—”

“I’m here for my things,” I say. “That’s it.”

“Can we talk—”

“No.”

“Please—”

“Move, Zara.”

She steps aside. I walk past her and go straight to the closet we shared, pull out a duffel bag, and start loading it with my clothes, methodical and fast, not looking at her.

“I’m sorry,” she says from the doorway.

I keep packing.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen—”

“You didn’t accidentally fuck my boyfriend for a month, Zara.” I don’t turn around. “That’s not something that just happens.”

“I know—”

“A month.” My voice rises despite myself. “A month you looked me in the eye every single day and lied to my face.”

“I wanted to tell you—”

“But you didn’t.” I zip the bag and move to the bathroom, sweep my toiletries off the shelf. “You just kept going.”

“It wasn’t like that—”

“Then what was it like?” I grab my things and shove them into the second bag. “Tell me. I’m genuinely dying to hear this.”

She’s crying now, properly crying, and when she speaks her voice is wrecked. “I love him.”

The words land like something physical.

“What?”

“I love him, Layla. I’ve loved him for months. Since before you two even started dating—”

“Then you should have TOLD ME.” I’m yelling now and I don’t care. “You should have said something instead of pretending everything was fine while you were—”

“I was scared—”

“Of what? That I’d be angry?” I laugh and it comes out wrong. “I’m furious right now, so what exactly would it have cost you to be honest?”

“I didn’t want to hurt you—”

“Well you did.” I grab my textbooks off the coffee table. “You hurt me and you humiliated me and you destroyed the only real friendship I had.”

“Layla—”

For one second, just one, I almost say it. Almost tell her that I understand, that I didn’t love Jace anyway, that if she’d come to me honestly we might have been able to figure something out, that it’s the lie I can’t forgive more than the boy. But then I see her face and I remember the hallway. The condoms scattering across the floor. Everyone’s phones out. Sienna crouching over me with that smile. And Zara knew that was coming. She knew exactly what Sienna was and she said nothing, not a single word of warning.

“We’re done,” I say. “Don’t call me. Don’t text me. Don’t try to fix this.”

Her face crumples. “Layla, please—”

“We’re done, Zara.”

I walk out. She’s still crying when the door closes behind me, and I keep walking and I don’t look back.

I sit in my car for a long time with the engine off and my bags in the back seat and nowhere to go.

There’s one option left. I’ve been avoiding it for months and I’m out of alternatives.

My mother and I have spoken maybe four times since dad died, short stilted calls where she talked about grief and healing and moving forward and I sat with the phone against my ear feeling like she was speaking a language I’d never been taught. Dad has been gone six months. Six months is not moving forward. Six months is still standing at the edge of something you can’t see the bottom of. But she’s all I have left, so I start the car.

I drive to the house I grew up in, the small two-bedroom in the suburbs where my parents brought me home from the hospital, where my dad taught me to ride a bike in the driveway, where he died in the back bedroom six months ago with a heart that had been quietly failing for years while he told everyone he was fine.

I pull in and notice immediately that something is wrong.

The front lawn is overgrown. The windows are dark. And there’s a FOR SALE sign in the grass, big and red and white, stuck right where my mother used to plant tulips every spring.

No.

I get out and try the front door. It opens.

“Mom?”

The house is almost empty. The furniture is gone. The pictures are off the walls. Boxes in every corner, taped and labelled in my mother’s handwriting. The whole thing looks like a set being struck after a show.

“Mom!”

“Layla?” She appears from the kitchen doorway and I barely recognise her. Her hair is different, styled and soft, and she’s wearing makeup and a dress I’ve never seen before, and when she rushes toward me with her arms open I see the ring. A diamond on her left hand, catching the morning light.

“Oh honey, you’re here!” She pulls me into a hug. “I was hoping you’d come by before—”

“What’s going on?” I pull back. “Why is there a for sale sign? Why is everything in boxes?”

“I was going to call you—”

“Mom.”

“I’m married.”

The words don’t process. “What?”

“I got married, sweetheart.” She holds up her hand. “Three days ago. It was small, just a few close friends, I wanted to tell you but you weren’t answering your phone—”

“You got married?" I stare at her. “Dad has been dead for six months—”

“I know—”

“Six MONTHS, Mom!”

“I know it’s fast—”

“It’s not fast, it’s completely insane.” I step back. “Who is he? How long have you known him?”

“A year.”

My brain goes quiet in a way that isn’t peaceful. “A year.”

“We met at a grief support group after your father died.” Her voice is patient and gentle, the voice she uses when she thinks I’m being unreasonable. “We were both—”

“You’ve been seeing someone for a year and you didn’t tell me?”

“I wanted to. But you were so angry after your father died—”

“I’m angry RIGHT NOW—”

“Layla—”

“You sold the house?” I gesture at the boxes, the bare walls, the empty space where our whole life used to be. “You sold dad’s house?”

“It’s too big for just me—”

“So you erased him.”

“I’m not erasing him—”

“You married someone else. You sold his house. You packed up every single thing—” I stop. “Where are you going?”

“Marcus has a house. A beautiful house, big enough for all of us—”

“All of us?”

She smiles and reaches for my hands. “You’re coming with me, honey. Marcus and his son are wonderful, you’ll love them. We’re having dinner there tonight so you can meet them properly—”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Her smile falters. “Layla—”

“You got married without telling me. You sold our house. And now you want me to play happy family with people I’ve never met?”

“He’s not a stranger—”

“He is to me!”

“Please.” Her eyes go soft and pleading in the way that has always been impossible to hold out against. “Just come to dinner. Meet him, meet his son, give them one chance. If you hate them you don’t have to move in. But please. Just try. For me.”

I want to say no. Every part of me wants to walk out that door and never look back.

But I have nowhere to go. No apartment, no money, no plan, no best friend, no boyfriend, nothing. And she’s looking at me like I’m the only solid thing left in her world, and I’m tired, and I’m out of options.

“Fine,” I say. “One dinner.”