Chapter 6: Kate, and the Name That Changes Everything

"Who's Kate?"

The question is out of my mouth before I decide to ask it. Christian goes still. Really still, the kind of still that tells me I hit something he wasn't ready for me to touch.

"Nobody," he says. Too fast. He hears it too, because he winces right after, like the word tasted wrong on the way out. "She's. We dated. Last year. It ended badly."

"How badly?"

He sets the phone face down on the table, like turning it over will make the message stop existing. His jaw works for a second before he answers. I watch him decide something, some private calculation I'm not part of, and then let it go.

"I saw her for three months. Nobody knew. My father found out through a business associate who spotted us at a hotel bar, and he had someone pay her family off before I even knew what was happening." He drags both hands down his face. "I found out after. She thought I orchestrated the whole thing. That I used her and then paid to make her disappear."

My stomach drops. "Did you?"

"No." Fast. Almost angry. Then quieter, the anger draining out of it. "But I didn't fix it either. I let my father handle it, because handling things is what he does, and by the time I understood what that meant for her, it was already done. She transferred schools. I never got the chance to tell her I didn't ask for any of it." He looks at me, and there's something close to pleading in it now. "I'm telling you because you need to know what you're walking into. Not because it excuses anything I did or didn't do."

I don't say anything for a moment. The radiator ticks somewhere behind us, an old building settling into the cold. Six years ago this same boy handed me his jacket in the rain and asked for nothing in return. Tonight he's telling me his family can make a girl disappear and he wouldn't even know until it was already finished.

"So whoever sent that text knows about Kate," I say slowly, turning it over. "That's not some stranger scrolling through gossip. That's someone close enough to know what your father actually did."

"That's what scares me." His voice drops, and for the first time all night it isn't careful or performed, it's just scared, a boy's voice underneath the practiced ease. "There are maybe six people who know the real story. My father. My mother. The lawyer who arranged it. Dom, because he was at the bar that night. Wyatt, because I told him myself once when I'd had too much to drink and needed to say it out loud to someone." He stops there, and I watch him count again in his head, like he's hoping the number will change if he does the math twice.

"That's five."

"Sloane." The name drops between us like something breaking on a tile floor. "She was at the bar too. She saw the whole thing happen and never said a word about it to anyone. I always told myself that meant she was being kind."

"Or she was saving it."

He doesn't answer that. We both already know which one is true, and the silence that follows feels different from every silence we've shared tonight. Heavier. Like the room itself is listening.

"I need to talk to her," he says finally.

"That's a terrible idea."

"I know it's a terrible idea." He's already gathering his things, movements too fast, too sharp, a boy trying to outrun his own fear by moving faster than it can catch him. "I'm doing it anyway. If Sloane is sitting on something that could destroy Kate's life a second time, or yours, I'm not going to sit here fixing commas in an essay while it happens around us."

Some old part of me wants to grab his sleeve and stop him right there. Six years of watching this exact boy from a careful, protective distance taught me that much, how to want someone's safety more than my own comfort. I don't reach for him. I let him go.

"Christian." He turns at the stairwell door, bag half slung over one shoulder. For just a second he doesn't look like the boy who denied knowing me this morning in front of a room full of people. He looks fifteen again, sitting with me on wet stone steps because the party inside had nothing to do with him and everything to do with a world he didn't choose. "Whatever you find out. Tell me the truth. Even if it's bad."

Something in his face loosens, cracks open in a way I haven't seen from him before. He crosses the space between us before I can brace for it, close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him in the library's cold air, close enough that my heart climbs straight into my throat without asking my permission first.

"I will," he says. "I promise you that."

He doesn't kiss me. I think it surprises us both, the way he stops himself at the last second, his hand drifting up toward my jaw and then falling back to his side instead, like he's decided somewhere in that half a second that I deserve better than a stolen moment built on the wreckage of someone else's pain.

Then he's gone, taking the stairs two at a time, his footsteps fading fast into the quiet of the building. I'm alone on the third floor with a half-fixed essay still glowing on his laptop screen and a name I can't stop turning over in my head. Kate. A girl erased so cleanly that nobody even thought to warn the next one who came along.

I pull out my phone, finally remembering my promise to Priya, my hands steady enough now to type. That's when I see it. A message already sitting there, sent eleven minutes ago, from a number I have never given to a single person at this school.

Ask him about the account. The one with your name on it. He's not as innocent as the jacket made you think.

I read it twice, then a third time, like repetition might change the words into something less frightening. My stomach drops through the floor, through the stairwell, through every careful wall I built around this boy six years ago and let him walk straight through tonight without even noticing I'd done it.

An account. With my name on it.

I have never had an account anywhere with Christian Ashworth's family money attached to it. Not once, in my entire life, not a single dollar I didn't earn myself behind a coffee counter.

Which means someone is lying to frighten me into doubting him.

Or somewhere out there, without my knowledge or my consent, my name has already been written into the exact same machine that swallowed Kate whole, and I am only now finding out I was never standing outside it at all.