Chapter 16: The Morning After

|HER POV|

I didn't sleep.

I lay on my back staring at the ceiling with my grey scarf pulled over my face like that was going to fix anything. It didn't. I could still feel the exact weight of his hand in my hair. The specific warmth of his mouth at the curve of my neck. The way he'd said Eirlys — my full name, held carefully for years, dropped into the dark like it belonged there.

Stop it.

I threw the scarf off. Stared at the water-stained ceiling instead. The radiator knocked twice. Went quiet.

Six days.

My phone lit up at seven forty-three.

Saoirse: you weren't at the gala

Saoirse: also you weren't in your room at eleven when I checked

Saoirse: LYSS

Saoirse: I'm going to need you at breakfast or I will begin constructing theories and my theories are always right

I put it face-down.

Got up. Dark trousers, black jumper, the charcoal coat. Hair into a bun that immediately lost two strands. Coffee stain still on the left sleeve from Tuesday — I hadn't bothered.

I went downstairs because the alternative was lying there cataloguing the exact sensation of his composure fracturing and that was not a productive Saturday morning.

Saoirse was already at the corner table with two coffees and an expression that had been building since eleven PM last night.

She looked at me the moment I sat down — a full three seconds of silent assessment — and I watched her eyes flick to the left side of my neck and stop there.

"Don't," I said, pulling one of the coffees toward me.

"I haven't said anything," she said carefully, in the tone of someone assembling something very large and choosing to do it slowly.

"You're about to."

"I'm just sitting here." She leaned forward slightly on her elbows, red hair loose, green eyes doing the thing where she catalogued everything simultaneously. "Lyss. There's a mark on your neck."

I set the coffee down.

"That," she said, voice dropping to barely above a whisper, "is not a nothing. That is a very specific something. That is actually the most significant something that has occurred since the formal and the formal was already—"

"Saoirse."

"I'm done." She picked up her coffee. She was not done. She was applying strategic patience and waiting for me to fill the silence, which I always did eventually and she knew it.

The dining hall moved around us. Plates, voices, the particular noise of a Saturday morning after an end-of-term gala — people reconstructing the previous night with the cheerful destruction of people who had nowhere more important to be.

I drank my coffee.

"He was in the study room," I said finally, looking at the table. "Fourth floor. I went to return a book." I paused, turning the cup in my hands. "Something happened."

"How much of something," she asked, very carefully, like she was defusing something.

"Enough," I said.

She went still. Not the impatient kind — the kind that meant she'd understood and was processing. Then she said, quietly: "Are you okay."

Not what happened. Not tell me everything. Are you okay.

The question landed differently than I expected. I looked at my hands on the table — ink on the second and third fingers, worn sleeve cuff — and thought about standing at that rainy window, turning around, making a decision that was not the sensible one and not regretting it, which was its own kind of problem.

"Yeah," I said. "I think so."

"Good." She nodded once, firm and satisfied. Then: "Now tell me everything."

I told her the parts that were mine to tell. Not all of it — some things were staying in that fourth-floor room — but enough. The courtyard conversation Saturday morning. The eight days. The way the silence had been carrying weight all term and last night it finally had somewhere to go.

Saoirse listened without interrupting, which was historically unprecedented.

When I finished she stared at her coffee for a moment. "He said he's been counting since September."

"Yes."

"He counted," she repeated, like the word needed more room than a single sentence could give it. "Since September. He has been counting the days." She looked up at me with an expression that was half disbelief and half something warmer. "Holy shit, Lyss."

"I'm aware."

"And you asked him—"

"Don't repeat it."

"You literally asked him if—"

"Saoirse."

"And he said—"

"I know what he said. I was there."

She sat back in her chair and pressed both hands to her face for approximately four seconds. When she dropped them she looked like someone who had been watching a very slow train approach a very obvious destination since September and had just watched it arrive. "Six days," she said.

"Six days," I confirmed.

"And then the full truth."

"That's the agreement."

She nodded slowly, picked up her coffee, and drank in silence for a moment. Then: "I have had questions about Kae Vire since the third week of term. I have been remarkably restrained about not asking them. When you get the full picture, I'm first."

"You're first," I said.

"Good." She stood, gathering her tray. Paused. Looked at me with the expression she used when she was saying the quiet part loud on purpose. "Also — the mark. Whoever made it was being very deliberate about what they were doing." She picked up her cup. "That's all I'm saying."

She left before I could respond.

I sat alone with the cooling coffee and the dining hall noise around me and the very specific, inconvenient problem that she was right. Deliberate was considerably more unsettling than accidental. Deliberate meant intention. Deliberate meant he'd been thinking about it.

Since September, apparently.

Outside, December rain came down over Blackthorn's iron gates. The lamp posts threw gold circles onto wet stone. Somewhere on the fourth floor, a study room still smelled of cedarwood and old carpet and the particular warmth of something that had finally been allowed to happen.

I picked up my coffee. Finished it. Stood up.

Six days.

~~~