Chapter Two: The Answer I Didn't Have

"Mia."

Eli said my name like a hand closing around my wrist. Not touching me. Just close enough that I felt it anyway.

"I need you to answer me," he said. "Whose is it."

My mouth was open and nothing was coming out of it. Somewhere behind me a car alarm chirped twice and shut off. A woman pushed a stroller past us on the sidewalk and gave us the fastest, most polite not looking possible, the kind people do when they can tell they've walked into something.

"Eli, can we not do this in a parking lot."

"You didn't answer the text. You didn't answer the door. You've had six months to answer me and now I'm standing right here, so yeah, we're doing this in a parking lot."

His voice cracked on right here. I hated that it did. I hated that some stupid, stubborn part of me still flinched toward him when his voice broke, after everything, after the group chat, after the way half the school had looked at me the Monday after that party like I was something they'd already decided the ending of.

"You already know what happened," I said. "You knew six months ago. That's why you ended it. Don't stand here and act like I'm about to tell you something new."

"I know what everyone else knows. That you went into a bathroom with some guy at that party and nobody could say who, because everyone in that hallway was too drunk to see straight, and I broke up with you over it because I couldn't stand not knowing, and I told myself that not knowing didn't matter anymore because we weren't together anyway." He dragged a hand down his face. "That's not what I'm asking you right now, Mia, and you know it."

"Then ask me the actual question."

"You know the actual question."

I did. I'd known it the second his eyes dropped to my stomach outside those sliding doors. I just needed him to be the one to say it, because some coward part of me still wanted this to be his fault for asking instead of mine for answering.

"Say it," I said.

His jaw worked. For a second I thought he wasn't going to, that he'd rather leave the question folded up small and unspoken between us forever than hear whatever came after it.

"Is there a chance it's not mine," he said. "Because of that night,because of whoever that was."

I could have lied. I want that on the record, whatever record this ends up being. I could have looked him dead in the eye and said "of course it's yours, that other thing doesn't even matter, the timing doesn't work like that," and some wrecked, cowardly part of me wanted so badly to just say the easy thing and watch the fear drain out of his face.

I didn't say it. Because it might not be true. And I had promised myself, on the bathroom floor at two in the morning more times than I could count, that whatever else I ruined, I would not lie about this. Not to him. Not to anyone.

"Yes," I said. "There's a chance."

The word landed and I watched something behind his eyes go very still, the way a room goes still right before something falls off a shelf.

"How big a chance," he said.

"The two nights were three days apart. I didn't plan it that way, I wasn't thinking about any of this that week, I was barely thinking at all. But the doctor confirmed the window lines up close enough that either one of them could be it. I've asked,I've done the math a hundred times hoping it would land somewhere cleaner than it does."

"Either one of them," he repeated. Quiet. "So you know who it was. The other guy. You've known this whole time."

"No." My voice cracked on it. "I don't. That's the part nobody believes, and I don't even blame them, but it's true. I was drunk, Eli, more than I should have let myself be, and it was dark, and I never saw his face, not once, and by the time I sobered up enough to try and piece it together it was already all over that chat and everyone had already decided their own version of what happened, and I never got to decide mine."

"Somebody knows," he said. "Somebody in that bathroom knows exactly who they are."

"Maybe. I don't."

He turned away from me for a second, hands laced behind his head, staring off across the parking lot like the answer might be written somewhere out past the cart corral. When he turned back his face had gone somewhere colder than angry, somewhere calculating, somewhere that scared me more than the shouting would have.

"So there's a version of this," he said slowly, "where I've spent six months hating a guy I don't even have a name for, and there's a version where none of that matters because it's mine anyway, and the only way either of us finds out which version we're actually living in is a test you can't take yet."

"That's exactly the version," I said. "Welcome to my last six months."

He didn't say anything for a long moment. I watched his hands curl loose at his sides and then unclench, like he was working something out with his own body before his mouth caught up.

"I need to know who it was," he said finally.

"I told you, I don't.. "

"Not from you. I believe you don't know. I actually believe that, which is somehow worse." His eyes came back to mine, sharp now, decided. "But somebody does. Somebody was in that hallway that night and saw more than they said, or knows something they never posted, and I am going to find out who that is, Mia, with or without your help."

Before I could answer, my phone buzzed against my hip.

I didn't reach for it fast enough. It buzzed again, longer this time, the kind of double pulse that meant a call, not a text, somebody trying to reach me right now, insistent, and I felt my whole body go rigid at the sound of it because some old instinct in me already knew whose name might be sitting on that screen if I looked.

Eli's eyes dropped to my pocket. Then back up to my face.

"Are you going to answer that," he said. It wasn't really a question. He was watching my face like it was the only honest thing left in the conversation, and maybe it was, because I could feel exactly what my face was doing and I couldn't stop it, the flinch, the way my eyes had already gone somewhere else entirely at the sound of that buzz.

My phone buzzed a third time, and this time it didn't stop, it kept going, ringing, loud enough now that Eli could hear it too, both of us frozen there listening to it go off in my pocket like a countdown neither of us could stop.

"Answer it," Eli said.