Chapter 2: What We Were

“You look like someone ran over your cat,” Priya says without looking up from her laptop.

I drop my bag by the door and sit on the kitchen counter because the chairs are covered in her biochem notes and I don’t have the energy to move them.

“Cole Whitfield is in my cohort.”

She looks up.

“Say that again.”

“You heard me.”

She closes the laptop. That’s how I know it’s serious. Priya does not close her laptop for anything short of emergency.

“Cole,” she says. “Your Cole.”

“Not my Cole.”

“The Cole.”

“Yes.”

She stares at me for a long moment. I stare back. There is a particular kind of friendship that doesn’t need a lot of words around the hard things, and this is that kind. She knows what that name costs me. She was there the summer I came home.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She gives me the look that means she does not believe me but she is also going to let me have it for now.

“Fine,” she says. “Okay. Fine.” She opens her laptop again. “What are you going to do?”

“My degree,” I say. “Same as I planned.”

She nods slowly. “Right.”

I get off the counter and go to my room and I stand at the window for a long time.

Here is what I don’t let myself think about often.

Cole Whitfield at nineteen had this way of asking questions where he actually waited for the answer. Not the polite pause people do where they’re already forming their next sentence. He would ask something and then go quiet and look at you like whatever you said next was the only thing happening in the world.

I noticed it the first week of freshman year. We were in the same intro psychology lecture, and after class he caught up to me in the hallway and said, “You disagreed with something he said. I could tell. What was it?”

I was so thrown by the directness that I told him. Something about the study the professor cited, how the sample size was too small to support the conclusion he was drawing. Cole listened to the whole thing. Then he said, “I didn’t catch that. I should have.”

Not interesting or cool or any of the things people say when they want you to think they were listening. Just: I should have caught that. Simple. Honest.

I was done for after that. I just didn’t know it yet.

We were friends first. That part matters. Three months of sitting together in lectures, studying in the library, arguing about things that didn’t matter and some things that did. He was the first person at Harlow who made me feel like my brain was the interesting part of me, not just the part I used to earn my place here.

When it became something else it felt like the most obvious thing that had ever happened. Like we had both been waiting for the other one to say it first.

He said it first.

We were in the library, the late section on the third floor where nobody goes after nine. He closed my textbook right in the middle of a page and said, “I like you. I’ve liked you since the hallway outside Richardson Hall and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.”

I remember the specific weight of that moment. The hum of the fluorescent light above us. The smell of old paper.

I said, “You closed my textbook.”

He said, “I know.”

I said, “I was in the middle of a page.”

He said, “I know. Do you like me back or not?”

I laughed. He smiled. That was it.

For eight months it was good. Genuinely, specifically good in the ways that matter. He remembered things. He showed up. When I was stressed about my research proposal he didn’t tell me it would be fine, he sat with me and read the whole thing and asked real questions. When his team had a bad loss he didn’t disappear into his mood, he called me anyway and talked through it.

We fought twice. Both times were real disagreements, not just noise. Both times we came back to each other and said what was actually true instead of what was easy.

I trusted him.

That is the sentence I have the hardest time with, even now. Not that he hurt me. Not even that he believed the lie. It’s that I had good reasons for the trust. It wasn’t blind. I built it on two years of evidence and it still wasn’t enough and I don’t entirely know what to do with that information.

I want to remember that I was happy. Before I get to the rest of it, I want to hold that part for one more second.

The coffee order he always got right without asking. The way he laughed at things I said that weren’t even jokes, just observations, because he thought the way I saw things was funny. His voice at eleven at night when he was tired and all the performance was gone and he was just himself.

I was happy.

I want to remember that I was happy before I tell you what happened next.

My phone buzzes on the windowsill. I pick it up.

It’s Theo.

hey, are you coming to my welcome week thing on friday

I type back: what welcome week thing

the one i told you about

you didn’t tell me about anything

i definitely did

Theo.

okay fine i forgot to tell you. it’s friday. the student union. please come nora i don’t know anyone yet

He is eighteen and starting undergrad and the only family I have within four hundred miles. I type back: I’ll be there.

He sends three celebration emojis and then: also i saw someone today who i think you know? tall, hockey jacket, kind of intense looking

I go very still.

his name was Cole

My thumb hovers over the screen.

he knew who i was. he asked about you