4 - You Forgot This

Nova's POV

I woke up gasping. The nightmares that had plagued my sleep for months now always came without warning.

One moment I was nowhere, the deep blank nothing of exhausted sleep, and the next I was there, cold air, concrete railing, the specific dark of a school building after hours. Fear that wasn't mine flooded my chest like water finding cracks, and I could feel her heart racing, my heart, hammering against my ribs with the desperate urgency of someone who knew, in the wordless animal way of knowing, that something was very wrong.

I couldn't see who was there. I never could. Just the shape of another presence, the sound of a voice I couldn't quite resolve into words, and then—

The room swam into focus around me, dusty mats, grey walls, the thin strip of light under the door. For three full seconds I didn't know where I was.

Then I did, and it was worse.

I sat up. Something slid off my shoulders, soft, unfamiliar — and I grabbed it before registering what it was. A sweater. Dark grey, slightly too large, smelling faintly of something cold and clean that I didn't recognize.

I stared at it.

Had that been here before? I ran back through the last hour in my mind, coming down the maintenance corridor after my last class, slipping into the equipment room with my phone and my notebook to follow up on the administrative records I'd found listed in Crestwood's 2023 annual report. I had sat down for five minutes. Just five minutes.

I looked at my phone.

6:47 p.m.

"No," I said, out loud, to nobody. "No."

My shift started at seven.

I was on my feet before the thought finished forming, grabbing my bag, my jacket, my notebook — shoving everything in without looking, already calculating. No time to go home. No time to change. I would have to go straight there and change into my uniform at the restaurant, which meant walking through the dining room in Crestwood clothes and hoping my manager was in the back.

He was not in the back.

"Reyes." He was standing at the host station with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who had been saving this conversation up since 6:50. "You want to tell me what time it is?"

"Seven-oh-four," I said. "I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

"That's what you said last—"

"It won't happen again," I said, and smiled at him with everything I had left, which was not a great deal.

He let me go. He always let me go. I was his best server and we both knew it, which was the only currency I had in this particular negotiation.

I changed in the back, pinned my hair up, and was on the floor in under four minutes.

_____________

The restaurant filled fast on weeknights. I moved through tables on autopilot. Order, deliver, refill, smile, repeat — the kind of rhythm that required just enough of my brain to keep me functional and left the rest of it free to run through everything I hadn't found yet in Crestwood's administrative records.

I was halfway through clearing table seven when I glanced up toward the VIP corner.

The VIP section was always dimly lit, low pendant lights, dark wood panelling, the specific ambiance of a place designed to make powerful people feel appropriately private. I didn't usually look too closely at the people in it. They didn't usually look at me.

Tonight I looked.

A boy sat across from an older man in a suit, silver-haired, straight-backed, the kind of posture that came from decades of expecting rooms to arrange themselves accordingly. The boy was broad-shouldered, dark blonde, turned slightly away from me, and everything about the line of his jaw and the set of his shoulders was—

My stomach dropped somewhere near the floor.

Ryker Lennox.

He was sitting across from who I could only assume was his grandfather, shoulders carrying the specific tension of someone enduring a conversation they had not consented to, turning a water glass in his hands with the slow, restless patience of someone who had run out of things to say and was waiting for the other person to finish.

He looked uncomfortable. He looked young. He looked nothing like the boy who had moved through Crestwood's hallway this morning like the building was grateful for his presence.

I took one step back. Then another. If I moved now, quietly, back toward the kitchen, there was no reason he should—

He turned.

Our eyes met across the restaurant.

I looked away immediately. Down at the table, at the glasses in my hand, at absolutely anything else. My heart was doing something complicated in my chest and I told it firmly to stop.

It's fine, I thought. It's dim. You're in uniform. Your hair is up. He saw you for four minutes this morning. He doesn't know who you are.

I walked back to the kitchen with the measured pace of someone who was absolutely not fleeing anything.

____________

I kept my back to the VIP corner for the rest of my shift.

By the time the restaurant emptied and I was gathering my things from the back room, I had almost convinced myself the whole thing hadn't happened. Almost. I would deal with tomorrow's version of this problem tomorrow. Right now I needed my clothes, my bag, and seven hours of sleep.

I found my bag. My jacket. My notebook.

I did not find my shirt.

I checked the hook. The floor. The chair. The shelf above the lockers that I'd never put anything on but checked anyway because the alternative was that my shirt had simply ceased to exist, which did not seem like a reasonable conclusion.

It was gone.

I stood in the empty break room in my uniform top and stared at the hook where my shirt was supposed to be, and tried to construct a rational explanation.

Then I noticed the sweater.

Still in my bag. Dark grey, slightly too large. The one I had woken up holding in the equipment room.

I pulled it out and looked at it properly for the first time. It was good quality — not a school-issue sweater, not something off a rack. The kind of thing someone had actually chosen. I turned it over in my hands.

I must have grabbed it by accident when I left, I decided. Something left behind in the equipment room by someone who had long since stopped needing it.

I put it on. It was warm and it covered the uniform top and I had a bus to catch, so I stopped thinking about it.

I wore it to school the next morning because my shirt still hadn't turned up and I was not examining this any further.

First period. I slid into my seat, pulled out my notebook, and turned to Chase who was already there, already smiling — and picked up the conversation we'd started yesterday about nothing that mattered and everything that kept him interested.

I was mid-sentence when the door opened.

Ryker Lennox walked in four minutes late with his hockey bag and that unhurried posture and the complete absence of any concern about being four minutes late. He said something to the teacher that made her wave him toward his seat without comment, which told me everything I needed to know about how Crestwood treated its hockey stars.

He was halfway down the aisle between desks when he stopped.

Looked at me.

Reached into his bag.

And placed my missing shirt on my desk with the calm of someone returning a library book.

"You forgot this," he said.

The classroom went very, very quiet.

I looked at the shirt. Then at him. The pieces rearranged themselves in my mind with the specific horror of something that had always been true and was only now becoming visible.

The dinner. The restaurant. The break room.

He had been there. He had recognized me and he had gone into the break room and taken my shirt. This was his way of telling me he had seen me.

He was still looking at me, grey-blue eyes, almost entirely unreadable — and the corner of his mouth was doing that thing that was not quite a smile.

The class erupted. Someone laughed. Someone else said something I didn't catch because the blood rushing to my face was louder.

He turned to walk to his seat. Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he glanced back.

"Oh," he said casually, eyes dropping to the sweater, his sweater, I understood now, with cold and absolute clarity — sitting on my shoulders like an accusation. "And my sweater looks really good on you."

The class lost its mind.

I sat perfectly still in the wreckage of my carefully constructed persona and thought, with great precision, about how much damage this little stunt had done to my plans and how I was going to make him regret this.