登入"It is starting."Those two words followed me to bed, sat on my chest while I stared at the ceiling, and were still there when my alarm went off at six thirty like they had nowhere better to be.I had not slept well. Again. The hallway between our rooms had been quiet after Rhys left, no sounds through the wall, no phone calls, nothing. Just silence that felt heavier than the usual kind.I got dressed. Went downstairs.He was already in the kitchen. Coffee made, two cups, one on the counter in the spot that had quietly become mine over the last few weeks. He was looking at his phone, expression unreadable, jaw slightly tight in the way it went when something was pressing against him that he was not ready to address.He looked up when I came in."How bad," I said.He considered the question. "Not yet bad. About to be."I picked up my coffee. "What does he want?""To talk." Rhys put his phone face-down on the counter. "My father does not call at ten thirty at night to make plans for the
"Tell me you did not go through his Instagram."Priya did not even look up from her phone. "I went through his Instagram."We were sitting in the back corner of the library during free period, bags on the table, the specific Thursday afternoon quiet that settled over this room like something permanent. I had come here to actually study. Priya had come here to report."Priya.""There are forty-seven posts. He barely uses it. Last post was eight months ago, which tracks with the Harrington timeline." She finally looked up. "But the ones before that are interesting."I told myself not to ask. "How interesting.""Come here."I moved my chair around the table. She tilted the phone toward me.The photograph was eighteen months old. Rhys at some kind of outdoor event, slightly younger in the face, same jaw, same build, but something different in the way he was standing. Looser. Less composed. He was laughing at something off camera, head tilted back, completely unguarded in a way I had only
"I need to tell you something."Drey was sitting on the hood of his car outside school, waiting, which meant he had been there a while. He did not wait unless something was pressing hard enough against his chest that moving felt wrong.I stopped in front of him. "Okay.""Not here." He nodded toward the passenger side. "Get in."I got in.He drove us three blocks to the park where we used to eat lunch sophomore year when the cafeteria felt too loud, pulled up along the curb, cut the engine. The afternoon was doing that specific golden thing where everything looks warmer than it actually is and the trees were just starting to turn at the edges.He did not say anything for a moment.Drey had a specific quality of silence. Not uncomfortable. Not loaded. Just full, the way silence gets when someone is carrying something heavy and taking a breath before they set it down."Three years," he said finally.I turned to look at him.He was staring at the windshield. Jaw set, hands loose in his la
"Something you want but cannot have."Mr. Vance wrote it on the board in clean, unhurried letters, then set the marker down and turned to face us like he had just said something completely ordinary.He had not said something completely ordinary."That is your prompt for the next two weeks," he said. "Two pages minimum. No genre restrictions. Fiction, personal essay, prose poetry — the form is yours. What I am looking for is honesty. Specifically the kind most people spend their whole lives learning to avoid."He let that sit.The room was quiet in the way classrooms go quiet when a teacher says something that accidentally lands too close to real life.I was staring at the board.Something you want but cannot have.Behind me, three rows back, I was aware of Rhys in the specific way I was always aware of Rhys now — like a frequency I had accidentally tuned into and could not locate the dial to tune back out. He had AP Literature this period too. I had not asked for that information. The
"You look terrible."Priya did not believe in easing into things.She was standing at my locker Monday morning, iced coffee in hand, head tilted, studying my face with the clinical precision of someone who had known me long enough to read every variation of my disaster."Thank you," I said, opening my locker. "That is exactly what I needed to hear.""I'm not being mean. I'm being observational." She leaned against the locker beside mine. "You have the face you get when something is living in your head rent-free. What is it?""Nothing.""Nova.""It's genuinely nothing, Priya, I just didn't sleep well.""Why?"I pulled out my History textbook. Closed my locker. Started walking.She followed. Of course she followed. Priya had been following me into things I wasn't ready to talk about since sophomore year and she had never once let me get away with nothing."There was a phone call," I said finally, quietly, because saying it out loud to someone felt better than saying it to my ceiling at
Nobody prepared me for what it actually meant to live with Rhys Caldwell.Not the assistant thing. Not the letter thing. Not even the swimming pool disaster or the midnight hallway negotiation that had somehow turned my entire senior year into a hostage situation.Nobody warned me about the mornings.Day three. Six fifty-two. I shuffled toward the kitchen in my oversized sleep shirt, hair doing something tragic, brain not yet technically online, thinking about nothing except coffee and whether I could drink it in peace before the world required anything from me.I pushed the kitchen door open.Rhys was standing at the counter.Shirt in his hand. Not on his body. In his hand, like he had just picked it up and had not yet decided what to do with it. His back was to me… broad, clean lines, the kind of effortless build that comes from actually using your body and not thinking about it… and he was reaching for something on the upper shelf with his free hand like this was a completely norma







