CHAPTER 10

**Jace's POV**

Jace waited outside the school long after everyone else had gone home.

He told himself he was just tired, that he was waiting for the parking lot to clear before he pulled out, but that was a lie and he knew it. He was waiting for Ezra. He'd been waiting since lunch, replaying that one second in the hallway over and over .... Ezra's face when their eyes met, the way something in it had just... shut, right in front of him, like a door closing on a room Jace hadn't even known he'd been let into.

He'd said nothing. He kept coming back to that. He'd stood there and said absolutely nothing while Logan held up that letter like a trophy, and every second of silence had felt, even at the time, like doing something wrong. He just hadn't known how to undo three years of being the reason people laughed at Ezra Monroe. There wasn't a version of "leave him alone" that would have come out of his mouth and sounded like anything other than a joke.

So he'd said nothing. And it had been the worst possible choice.

Ezra came out the side entrance an hour after the last bell, backpack slung over one shoulder, eyes red-rimmed in a way he was clearly trying to hide behind his hair. He didn't see Jace at first. When he did, something flickered across his face .... not surprise, exactly. More like exhaustion. Like he simply didn't have anything left to react with.

"Don't," Ezra said, before Jace had said a word.

"I just want to walk with you."

"I don't need an escort."

But he didn't tell him to leave either, and Jace took that as the only invitation he was going to get. They walked in silence, the distance between them careful, deliberate, Ezra's arms wrapped around himself like he was cold even though it wasn't cold at all.

Jace opened his mouth twice and closed it again. Every sentence he built in his head sounded wrong before it even reached his tongue.

Finally, three streets from home, he said it anyway.

"About the letter...."

"Don't." Ezra's voice cracked on the word, sharp and immediate, like he'd been bracing for this exact sentence the entire walk.

"Ezra, I just want to...."

"I said don't." He stopped walking. Turned to face him, and Jace saw it then, the tears already gathering, bright and furious, like Ezra was fighting them with everything he had left. "You want to talk about it? Fine. It was a joke."

"What?"

"The letter." Ezra's voice shook, but he pushed through it, chin lifted, jaw tight. "It was a dumb dare. Some stupid thing Sophie put me up to. I didn't mean any of it."

"You're lying."

"I'm not."

"Ezra." Jace's chest ached watching him say it, watching the tears finally spill over even as Ezra kept talking like nothing was happening on his own face. "You're crying right now."

"I'm not crying because of you." Ezra wiped his cheek hard with the back of his hand, furious at himself, at the tears, at all of it. "I'm crying because I'm tired. Because today was humiliating, and it's easier for everyone if they think it was nothing. So it was nothing. Just tell people it was a joke and let it go."

"I'm not telling anyone anything, because it wasn't a joke, and we both know it."

"Stop." Ezra's voice broke completely now, and he pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes like he could physically shove the tears back in. "Stop being nice to me. You don't get to do that. Not today. Not after you stood there and let them do that to me."

"I know." Jace's own throat felt tight in a way he wasn't used to. "I know, and I'm sorry, and I don't have some excuse that makes it okay, but I'm not going to stand here and let you tell me it didn't mean anything when I can see that it did."

"It didn't." Ezra's whole face was wet now, the lie sitting there between them, obvious and useless and desperate. "I don't love you. I never did. It was a joke, Jace, just like everything else, so can we please just go home and forget this happened."

He turned and walked the rest of the way alone, fast, arms wrapped tight around himself, and Jace stood on the sidewalk and watched him go, every instinct telling him to follow and knowing, for once, that following would only make it worse.

He'd never seen anyone lie so badly in his life.

He'd also never felt so completely unable to do anything about it.

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.