CHAPTER 10 - THE EMPTY SEAT

*Jace's POV*

Jace didn't sleep that night.

He lay on top of his covers, still in yesterday's clothes, staring at the ceiling and replaying the same six words on a loop until they stopped sounding like language and started sounding like something being carved into him.

*I loved you. Not anymore.*

He'd heard people say things like that in movies. It always looked clean there .... dramatic, final, the kind of line that gave a scene its shape and then let everyone move on. It didn't feel clean. It felt like something lodged sideways in his chest that he couldn't cough up no matter how many times he tried.

He kept waiting for the part where he stopped caring. That was supposed to be the next step. Ezra Monroe had been an easy target for three years .... soft, quiet, an easy laugh to get in a room that was always looking for one. Jace had never once lost sleep over anything he'd said to him.

He'd never once *meant* to.

That was the part he kept circling back to, lying there at two in the morning. He hadn't meant any of it the way it had landed. It had just been what everyone did. What he'd always done. A joke was a joke until somebody's whole face changed color and their eyes went somewhere far away, and Jace realized, staring at his ceiling, that Ezra's face had done that more times than he could count and he'd never once stopped to notice.

He was noticing now. Now, when it didn't matter. Now, when the door had already closed.

Ezra's seat in English was empty the next morning.

Jace told himself it didn't mean anything. People got sick. People took a day.

It was empty the day after that too.

By Thursday, whispers had started .... not about the letter anymore, that had already burned through the school's attention span and moved on to something else, some new story about a hookup at a party Jace hadn't bothered to track. This whisper was different.

*Have you seen Monroe?*

*I heard he's not coming back this year.*

*Good. Weird kid anyway.*

Jace wanted to put his fist through the locker next to the last one's face. He didn't. He just walked past, jaw tight, and told himself it wasn't his business what people said, even though every word landed somewhere it shouldn't have.

Mr. Holloway announced, without much ceremony, that the semester project pairings were being adjusted. Jace would be finishing his section alone.

"Everything okay?" Mason asked at lunch, watching him push food around his tray without eating any of it.

"Fine."

"You've said like four words to anyone all week."

"I'm tired."

Mason studied him a moment too long, the way he did whenever he suspected Jace was lying and had decided not to push it yet. "This is about Monroe, isn't it."

Jace didn't answer, which was answer enough.

"Everyone's saying he might be transferring," Mason said. "You know something about that?"

"No."

He did know something. He knew that a week ago, Ezra had told him to stay out of his life with tears in his eyes and his voice shaking, and Jace had listened, because for once in his life he genuinely didn't know what else to do.

He was starting to think that had been the wrong call.

The last day of the semester, results were posted outside the main office. Students crowded around the board in loose, chattering clusters, comparing grades, groaning, celebrating. Jace found his name near the top, barely registered the number next to it, and scanned the list twice more without meaning to.

Monroe wasn't there.

He checked with the office anyway, some excuse half-formed about needing to confirm project credit, and the woman at the desk gave him a distracted, apologetic look.

"Ezra withdrew for the rest of the term," she said. "His mother came in and collected his transcript records last week."

"Withdrew?," Jace repeated.

"I really can't say more than that, sweetheart." She was already looking past him at the next student in line.

Jace stood there a second too long before someone behind him cleared their throat.

He drove home that afternoon and parked in his usual spot, and for the first time in years, he actually looked at the house across the street instead of just registering it existed. It looked the same as always. Neat lawn. Porch light. Nothing about it suggested anything had happened at all.

He crossed the street before he'd fully decided to.

Monica Monroe answered the door with an expression that told him she already knew who he was and had already decided what she thought of him. It wasn't hostile, exactly. It was worse than that. It was tired.

"Jace." She said

"I wanted to see if Ezra's around."

"He isn't."

"Is he okay?"

grief flickered across her face ..... "He's not here," she said again, gentler this time, like she was choosing not to say the rest of what she was thinking. "I don't know when he'll be back."

"Can you tell him I...."

"I think you should go home, Jace."

She wasn't unkind about it. That almost made it worse. She closed the door softly, not a slam, just a quiet, final click, and Jace stood on the porch a long moment before walking back across the street to a house that suddenly felt too big and too quiet for one person to be standing alone in it.

That night he sat by his window, the way he'd started doing without really deciding to, staring at the dark room across the street where a light used to come on some evenings, faint gold through gauzy curtains, someone moving around inside it.

It stayed dark.

It stayed dark the next night too.

Summer stretched out ahead of him, long and shapeless, and Jace understood, sitting there in the quiet, that he had absolutely no idea how to fix the thing he'd broken .... or whether Ezra would ever give him the chance to try.