WHAT HER BODY WAS BUILT FOR

***

His head went under, and it didn't come back up.

I didn't think. I dropped my shoes and hit the water before anyone else on the shore had even started screaming.

I was ten years old that summer, already the strong one in a family that treated strength like a design flaw. Meridian Lake was cold enough to steal the breath straight out of my chest, but I'd always been built for exactly this, sturdy in the way relatives whispered about at barbecues, sturdy in the way that made my mother wince every time she introduced me. "Selene's built like a boy," she'd say, like it was an apology she owed people before they had the chance to notice themselves. I'd spent years afterward trying to make myself smaller in every photograph, hunching my shoulders, wearing clothes a size too big, hoping if I just tried hard enough, I could disappear into whatever shape my family actually wanted.

That day, with a twelve-year-old boy's dead weight in my arms at the bottom of that lake, I was finally grateful for every inch of it.

I found him three feet down, eyes closed, body already gone limp in that boneless, terrifying way that means a person is running out of time. I hooked my arm under his chest and kicked, hard, dragging both of us toward the surface like my life depended on it instead of his. He was heavier than me. I didn't care. I'd been carrying things heavier than myself my whole life.

I got him to the shallows and pumped his chest until he coughed up a mouthful of lake water and started breathing on his own again. His eyes opened. Green, unfocused, terrified.

That should have been the moment I stayed. Instead, I heard voices coming down the path, and ten-year-old panic beat ten-year-old pride by a mile. I wasn't supposed to be at the lake alone. So I ran, soaking wet, hiding behind the big oak tree at the edge of the clearing.

I watched my eight-year-old sister step onto the grass seconds later. Dry. Delicate. Perfectly unbothered.

"I saved him! I pulled him out of the water!"

Nobody checked her dress for lake water. Nobody asked how a girl half my size had dragged a boy twice her weight onto dry land. They didn't have to ask, because the lie already made perfect sense to them. Of course it was Vivian. Vivian was small and soft and easy to imagine as delicate enough to need saving herself, let alone doing the saving. I was the sturdy one, the one everyone already assumed could survive just about anything on her own, including being forgotten.

They wrapped Ryker Kane in a blanket and thanked the golden Marlowe girl for being a hero, while I stood behind that tree, soaked to the bone, understanding for the first time something I would spend the next fourteen years unable to shake.

In my family, a girl's body decided her story before she ever opened her mouth.

I never told anyone the truth. Not my parents, who would have asked why I disobeyed them before they ever asked if I was alright. Not Vivian, who wore the story like a crown for years, retelling it at every dinner until even I started to lose the exact shape of what had actually happened. I used to think keeping the secret was a kind of quiet power, something only I would ever know. I didn't understand yet that secrets like that don't stay small. They wait, patient as anything, for exactly the wrong moment to come back and collect.

Fourteen years of silence sat heavier in me than any water ever had.

***

The toasts were still going when I slipped back to my seat, Ryker's father's voice carrying warmly across the ballroom, praising Vivian's grace, her elegance, her light. I clapped along with everyone else, the practiced motion of hands that had learned a long time ago how to look enthusiastic about someone else's happiness.

Vivian found me at the edge of the room an hour later, flushed from champagne, her smile a little too wide.

"You disappeared," she said.

"I got a phone call."

"From who?"

"Julian." I studied her face, searching for whatever Julian's cousin had overheard. "Viv, is everything okay?"

"Why wouldn't it be? I just got engaged." Her laugh came out too fast, too bright, brittle at the edges in a way I recognized immediately, because I'd spent my whole life learning to read every version of my sister's moods.

"You seem tense."

"I'm fine, Selene. God, can you just let me have tonight?" She grabbed another glass of champagne off a passing tray, her hand not quite steady around the stem. "Not everything has to be about you noticing something's wrong."

"I'm not trying to make it about me. I'm trying to make sure you're okay."

"When have you ever needed to worry about me? I'm the lucky one, remember? I'm the one who gets everything." Something bitter slipped through the champagne haze in her voice, gone as fast as it appeared. "Isn't that what everyone's always said?"

"Vivian…"

"I have to go find Ryker. People are asking where I am." She was already turning away, already sliding back into the version of herself the room expected to see.

I let it go, the way I always did, the way I'd trained myself to for fourteen years.

I shouldn't have.

An hour later, as the party wound down, I watched Vivian slip out a side door alone, her phone pressed to her ear, her face pale under the string lights. I followed her far enough to hear one broken sentence before she disappeared around the corner of the building.

"I can't do this anymore. Not after tonight."

I didn't catch who she was talking to. I only caught the fear in her voice, raw and unguarded in a way I'd never once heard from my sister in twenty-two years of being related to her. Vivian didn't do fear. Vivian did performance, drama polished to a shine for whoever was watching. This was different. This sounded real.

I almost followed her. I almost pushed past the side door and demanded she tell me what was actually happening, whatever secret had turned my golden, untouchable sister into someone I barely recognized in the space of one engagement party. I think about that moment more than almost any other in my life, the version of that night where I moved faster, where I didn't let old habits keep me standing still at the edge of a room, waiting to be noticed.

By the time I found my own car in the valet line twenty minutes later, Vivian's car was already gone, and my phone was already buzzing with a text that would end the only version of my life I'd ever known.

Tell him I'm sorry.

I stared at those four words under the parking lot lights, my heart slamming against my ribs, and somewhere in the distance, sharp and getting closer, a siren started screaming through the dark, loud enough that I dropped my keys twice before I could force my shaking hands to unlock the car.