Chapter 8: The Real One

I found him after practice, waiting by his own choice this time instead of chasing me down, leaning against the boards with his gear bag already over his shoulder like he'd known I was coming.

"Savannah came to see you."

"You knew she was back?"

"I knew she might be, eventually. I didn't know when." He pushed off the boards, and for once he didn't try to arrange his face into anything easy. "What did she tell you?"

"That your father's accident wasn't what everyone says it was. That she got messages about it three years ago, right before she left. That whoever's texting me now is probably the same person."

Something in his jaw went tight, and he was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer at all.

"My father was a sports accountant. University athletics, back when I was a kid." He said it carefully, each word placed like it cost him something specific. "He found something in the books he wasn't supposed to find. I don't know all the details, I was nine, nobody explains financial fraud to a nine-year-old. What I know is he was going to report it, and three weeks later he was dead in a car that the police said skidded on ice that wasn't actually there that night. I checked the weather records myself, years later. It was sixty-one degrees."

"Ethan."

"Nobody ever investigated it as anything but an accident. My mom didn't have the money or the will to fight it. I grew up believing it, mostly, because believing anything else meant believing someone got away with killing my father and nobody ever answered for it." His voice had gone flat, the particular flatness of someone reciting a story they'd told themselves so many times it had stopped feeling like a wound and started feeling like a fact. "Then, sophomore year, right when things were getting serious with Savannah, I started getting messages. Not about her. About him. About people who still had reasons to make sure that story never got reopened."

"Who?"

"I don't know for certain. I have a name I can't prove and won't say out loud until I can." He looked at me then, steady, careful. "That's not me hiding things from you, Lily. That's me trying not to get either of us hurt by saying something I can't back up yet."

"Is that why you and Savannah really ended?"

"Partly." He exhaled, slow. "I got scared. Not of her, of what being close to her meant if someone was watching me closely enough to know things about my father I hadn't even told her. I pulled away. Badly, probably, looking back. She left the school entirely not long after, and I've spent three years telling myself that was just about the messages getting to her, but I don't actually know that's the whole truth either."

"You don't know a lot of things, apparently."

"I know that's not a satisfying answer." He said it quietly, no defensiveness in it. "I know you have every reason not to believe half of what I'm telling you, because I've spent three years being careful with the truth around the people I care about most, and look how that's gone."

I studied him a long moment, trying to decide how much of this to let land, how much to hold at arm's length the way I'd been holding everything since the first anonymous text arrived.

"I want to believe you."

"But you don't. Not completely."

"Not completely," I admitted, because it felt more honest than pretending otherwise. "You've explained Savannah. You've explained the fear. You still haven't explained who's texting me, or why they know things about your family that even you don't have proof of, or why Coach Reynolds looked at me like I was already in danger the very first day I walked into that arena."

"I don't have all those answers yet."

"Then I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the answers you do have."

He didn't argue with that. He just nodded, slow, like he'd expected exactly this reaction and had already made peace with not getting anything easier from me.

"Then I'll keep finding the rest," he said. "And you can believe as much or as little as you want in the meantime. I'm not going anywhere either way."

I walked away from that conversation with more information than I'd had in a week and less certainty than I'd had before any of it started, and somewhere on the walk back to my dorm, my phone buzzed one more time.

Unknown Number.

Good. Now you're asking the right questions.