Chapter 2: Don't Say Her Name

He caught me outside the library before I'd made it ten feet from the door.

"You ran."

"I didn't run. I had somewhere to be." I kept walking, and he fell into step beside me, still in his practice gear, hair damp, like he'd left the rink mid-conversation just to catch me before I disappeared into the stacks. "I still have somewhere to be, Ethan."

"It can wait."

"It really can't."

"Lily." He stepped in front of me then, not blocking the path exactly, just enough that stopping became easier than pretending I hadn't noticed him do it. Up close he looked older than I let myself remember, the boy from three years ago sharpened into something more certain, more careful, and somehow it made the whole conversation feel more dangerous instead of less. "Three years. You've crossed the street to avoid me. You've timed your library trips around my practice schedule, don't think I never noticed. And today you looked me dead in the eye and turned around like I was something you needed to get away from. I want to know why."

"You don't get to ask me that."

"Why not?"

"Because you already know why." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, three years of something I'd kept carefully folded away finally working its way loose. "You don't get to act confused, Ethan. You were there."

"I genuinely don't know what you think I did."

"Don't." The word came out before I could stop it, low and hard. "Don't do that. Don't stand there and pretend you don't know exactly what happened."

"Lily, I'm asking you to tell me, because from where I'm standing, I did nothing except watch you disappear from my life without a single explanation. One day we were talking every night, and the next you wouldn't even look at me in the hallway. I spent months trying to figure out what I did."

"You really don't know."

"I really don't."

Something about the certainty in his voice almost made me believe him, and I hated how easily three years of careful distance could crack just from the sound of him sounding sure of something.

"Is this about Savannah?"

I felt my whole body go rigid at the name, some old, exposed nerve lighting up before I could stop it.

"Don't say her name."

"Lily—"

"I mean it, Ethan. Don't."

"I need you to let me explain—"

"There's nothing to explain. I know what happened. I was there for the part that mattered, even if you weren't." I stepped around him, done standing still, done letting this conversation happen in the middle of a path where anyone could walk by and watch three years of something neither of us had ever named come apart in public. "I have to go."

"Lily, please, just give me thirty seconds—"

"Why now? Why after three years do you suddenly need thirty seconds?"

"Because I'm tired of watching you look at me like I'm something you survived instead of someone you used to know." His voice cracked on the last word, just barely, and it was almost enough to make me stop walking entirely. "Just thirty seconds. That's all I'm asking."

I almost gave them to him.

I want that on the record too, wherever this ends up being recorded. For one full second I actually turned back toward him, mouth already opening around the start of something I hadn't planned to say, and that was exactly when my brother's voice found us across the quad.

"Carter." Mason's voice cut across the quad before either of us could say anything else, easy and unbothered, completely unaware of what he'd just walked into. "There you are. Coach is looking for you, some equipment thing." He glanced between us, reading nothing in either of our faces, the particular blindness of a brother who'd never once considered his best friend and his sister as anything but separate compartments of his life. "Everything good here?"

"Fine," I said, too fast.

"Fine," Ethan echoed, a half beat behind me, his eyes still on mine even as he answered Mason.

"Cool. Come on, man, Reynolds hates waiting." Mason clapped Ethan on the shoulder, already turning, already moving toward the arena without waiting to see if either of us followed. He paused halfway, glancing back over his shoulder. "Lil, you coming to dinner Sunday? Mom's doing the thing with the pot roast."

"Wouldn't miss it."

"Good. Ethan, you're invited too, if you can stand another two hours of Dad asking about your draft stock."

"Wouldn't miss that either," Ethan said, and something in his voice sounded almost normal, almost like the boy who used to sit at that same table every Sunday without anyone thinking twice about it, before three years of silence made every one of those dinners a small, careful negotiation about who got to look at whom.

Mason jogged off without waiting for anything further, entirely unaware he'd just spent thirty seconds standing in the wreckage of a conversation neither of us had finished.

Ethan didn't move right away. He stood there a second longer, something unfinished still sitting in the space between us, and for just a moment I thought he might ignore Mason entirely and say whatever he'd been trying to say before I cut him off.

"This isn't over," he said instead, quiet, just for me.

"It's been over for three years."

"Then why do you still look like that every time I say her name?"

I didn't have an answer for that, not one I was willing to give him standing in the open where Mason could turn around at any second, and I watched him go, jogging to catch up with my brother like the last ninety seconds hadn't happened at all, like he hadn't just asked me a question I'd spent three years refusing to answer even inside my own head.

I walked the rest of the way to the newsroom on legs that didn't feel entirely like mine, replaying the conversation from every possible angle, trying to decide whether the confusion on his face had been real or just another performance I didn't know how to read anymore. Three years should have been long enough to forget what his face looked like when he lied. Apparently it wasn't.

I made it exactly four steps past the newsroom door before my phone buzzed. Not Julian. Not Priya.

Unknown Number.

I almost ignored it, my hand already halfway to silencing the screen, some instinct from three days ago still telling me nothing good ever came from a number I didn't recognize. Then I actually read it.

You're blaming the wrong person.

I stood there in the hallway a long moment, phone lit in my hand, feeling the ground shift under a conversation I'd thought I already understood completely. Three years of certainty, and one stranger with my number apparently knew something I didn't.

I typed out who is this. I deleted it. I typed out what do you mean and deleted that too, because some instinct older than logic told me I wasn't going to like the answer, whoever ended up giving it to me, and that whatever I thought I knew about that summer, somebody else clearly knew more.