Chapter Two

For a second, nobody moved. The string lights buzzed faintly overhead. Somewhere behind me a chair scraped against stone, ordinary and obscene in how normal it sounded. My whole body had gone strange and distant, like I was watching the scene from a few feet outside myself — the amber light, the two of them frozen mid-laugh, my own hands cold at my sides.

Then Sereia's hand slid off his arm — not guilty, just curious, the way you'd move if a stranger walked into your kitchen. She looked at me, then at him, then back at me, waiting for someone to explain who I was.

Valerian didn't reach for an explanation. He reached for irritation.

"Zéphyrine." My name came out flat, almost annoyed, like I was the one who'd interrupted something. "What are you doing here?"

That was the first wrong note. Not I can explain. Not even my name said softly. Just: what are you doing here, like I was the intrusion in my own relationship. I felt it land somewhere low in my stomach, sharper than anything Sereia's hand on his arm had done.

"You texted me to meet you here." My voice sounded strange to my own ears — too calm, considering the ground had just dropped out from under me. "Ten minutes ago."

Sereia's face changed. Something clicked into place behind her eyes, and for one unguarded second she looked almost as blindsided as I felt. Then Valerian was up, moving toward me, putting his body between the two of us like he could physically block the moment from becoming what it already was.

"It's not what it looks like."

I laughed. It came out wrong, too sharp, nothing like a real laugh. "What does it look like, Val?"

"Can we not do this here?"

Here. Like the problem was the location. Like if we just moved twenty feet away, whatever I'd seen would stop being true.

• • •

He walked me out before I could decide whether I wanted to be walked anywhere, one hand at the small of my back, steering more than guiding. The night air hit my face and I realized my hands were shaking. I shoved them into my coat pockets so he wouldn't see.

"Sereia's just a friend," he said, once we were alone on the walkway, like that sentence alone was supposed to dissolve everything I'd just watched with my own eyes.

"A friend who has her hand on your arm like that?"

"You're twisting it."

"I'm not twisting anything. I saw you."

"You saw two people talking." His voice climbed, defensive now, the irritation from before hardening into something closer to accusation. "You always turn everything into something it's not."

"Then tell me what it is."

He didn't answer. Not right away. And that silence — that half second where he should have had an easy explanation and didn't — told me more than anything he said after it. But I didn't let myself hear it yet. I wanted him to fix this too badly to notice I already had my answer.

"You show up looking for a fight," he said finally, "and you wonder why I don't want to talk to you about my day anymore."

"That's not—" I stopped. Started again. "I'm not looking for a fight, I'm looking for the truth."

"The truth is I've had a horrible week. My father's on me about the company, I haven't slept, and the one time I try to unwind for twenty minutes, you show up acting like I've committed a crime."

Something in me wanted to say: you have. But the words caught, because he'd already pivoted, already made his exhaustion the center of the conversation, and somehow I was standing there feeling guilty for interrupting his twenty minutes.

"You never used to be like this," he added, shaking his head slowly, like he was mourning something. "You used to trust me without turning every little thing into an interrogation."

I opened my mouth to say I wasn't interrogating anything, that I'd simply seen what I'd seen, but the sentence dissolved before I could finish building it. Somewhere between the lounge and the walkway, the conversation had stopped being about what happened and started being about what kind of girlfriend I was for reacting to it.

"You've been distant for weeks," he added, quieter now, almost hurt. "I didn't know how to bring it up. Sereia listens. That's all it was."

Distant. The word landed somewhere soft and unprotected in my chest. Had I been distant? I thought of the double shifts, the hospital calls, the assignments I'd been finishing at two in the morning. Had all of that looked like distance to him? Was that my fault too?

"I've been trying to keep everything from falling apart," I said, but it came out smaller than I meant it to, less like a defense and more like an apology I hadn't earned the right to give.

"I know." He reached for my hand. I let him take it, hating myself a little for how much I wanted the anger to stop, for how badly I wanted this to be a misunderstanding instead of what it actually was. "I know you're under a lot. Maybe that's on me too — I should've told you I needed someone to talk to instead of just... talking to her."

It sounded almost reasonable. That was the trick of it. Nothing he said was a lie exactly. It was true that I'd been distant, in the small, exhausted ways survival makes a person distant. It was true he'd had a hard week. Every sentence was built from something real, arranged into a shape that made the actual problem disappear.

By the time he pulled me into a hug, my mouth against the collar of his jacket, I no longer knew whether I'd caught him in something or simply stumbled into a moment I didn't understand.

"I'm not trying to hurt you," he murmured into my hair. "I would never do that to you."

I wanted so badly to believe him that I let myself.

• • •

I walked back across campus alone afterward, because he had somewhere to be — of course he did — and I told myself the cold air would clear my head. It didn't. It just gave the confusion room to spread.

I kept replaying the scene at the lounge, trying to make it smaller in memory than it had been in the moment. Maybe her hand hadn't really rested there the way I remembered. Maybe the light had made it look different than it was. I caught myself doing it — actively editing what I'd seen with my own eyes to make it fit the story he'd given me — and some small, still-sane part of me recognized that for what it was. I just didn't know yet what to do with the recognition.

By the time I reached the fountain outside the library, I'd almost convinced myself the whole night had been a misunderstanding I'd caused.

• • •

Neriah found me by the fountain outside the library twenty minutes later, and one look at my face told her everything I hadn't said yet.

"What happened?"

"Nothing. It's fine."

"Zéphyrine." She said my full name the way she only did when she wasn't going to let something go. "Your eyes are doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you've been crying and you're pretending you haven't." She sat down on the edge of the fountain beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and waited, which was somehow worse than if she'd pushed.

I opened my mouth to deny it, and instead, somehow, what came out was: "I found him with Sereia. It looked bad. But he explained it — he's been under a lot of pressure, and I haven't exactly been the easiest person to be around lately, and—"

"Zéphyrine."

"It's fine, Neriah, really—"

"You're defending him before I've even said anything." She wasn't angry. That was almost worse. She just looked at me like she was watching something she'd seen happen before and couldn't stop. "I haven't said a single word about him and you're already building his case."

"I'm not building a case, I'm just telling you what he said."

"You're telling me what he said like it's evidence he's innocent." She reached over and took my hand, not gently exactly, more like she was trying to physically anchor me to something. "What did you see, Zéphyrine? Not what he explained. What did your own eyes actually see?"

I didn't have an answer for that. I looked down at my hands instead, at the chipped edge of a nail I'd been meaning to fix for a week, and said nothing, because some small, quiet part of me knew she was right and I wasn't ready to know that yet.

She didn't push further. She just put her arm around my shoulders and walked me back toward the dorms, and I let her, grateful for the silence, terrified of what would happen if she filled it.

• • •

He called at eleven that night.

I'd been lying on top of my covers for an hour by then, still fully dressed, phone resting on my chest like I was waiting for something without letting myself admit it. Every time a car passed outside, headlights sweeping across the ceiling, some small, stupid part of me hoped it was him, coming to say something that would make the whole day make sense again.

I almost didn't answer. I sat up when it finally rang, the screen lighting up in my hand, his name glowing there like a question I hadn't decided how to answer, and some tired, bruised part of me thought: let it ring.

I answered anyway.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey." A pause. Not the kind that meant he was collecting an apology. The kind that meant he was deciding how to say something else entirely. "I've been thinking about tonight."

"Me too."

"I need you to trust me," he said. "I need to know you're not going to keep bringing this up every time you feel insecure."

"I'm not insecure, Val, I saw—"

"If you really love me," he said, cutting through it, calm and certain, like he was stating a fact instead of a demand, "you'll prove you trust me."

I sat there with the phone against my ear, the room silent except for the hum of the radiator, and I didn't say anything at all. I just stared at the screen, at his name still lit up, and thought — distantly, like the thought belonged to someone else —

How is he the one asking me to prove something?

I didn't have an answer. I wasn't sure, that night, that I was even allowed to ask the question.