Ava

LENA

Ava finds me on the common room floor on a Thursday, the one time I forget to make myself scarce before she gets back from her lab. I've pulled the couch cushions half off their frame and I'm running my fingers along the seams of the armrest, feeling for anything that shouldn't be there - a bump, a wire, a lens no bigger than a pinhead. I have a textbook open on the coffee table for cover, but I haven't looked at it in twenty minutes. She drops her bag by the door, quiet about it, which isn't like her. Ava usually announces herself the way weather does.

"What are you doing?" she asks, sitting on the arm of the chair across from me, not the chair itself, like she's not planning to stay long enough to get comfortable.

"Dropped an earring." The lie comes fast, too fast, and I shove the cushion back into place.

She watches me a second too long. "You've looked like a ghost for weeks. Talk to me."

I glance at the outlet by the bookshelf, the smoke detector in the corner, the little green light on the router that might mean nothing or might mean everything. My mouth stays shut around all of it.

"I'm fine," I say instead.

"You're not." She says it plainly, no heat in it. "You don't have to tell me what's wrong. I'm not asking for a story. I just want you to know I'm here if you need to put it somewhere."

That's the whole difference between her and Sophie, right there, laid out so simply I almost laugh. Sophie asks questions like she's collecting them, filing them somewhere I can't see. Ava doesn't ask anything. She just sits on the arm of the chair with her hands loose in her lap, waiting, like she has nowhere else to be, like time doesn't cost her anything right now. No probing. No fishing. Just presence, unpolished and real, the kind that doesn't perform itself for an audience.

Something in my chest gives a little, a small collapse, like a shelf finally buckling under weight it's held too long. But my eyes keep cutting to the corners of the room, to the shadows behind the lampshade, to the crack under the door where anyone could be standing, listening, and the words back up in my throat like water against a closed drain.

"There's this guy," I start anyway, my voice smaller than I mean it to be. "There was. Is. I don't even know what tense to use anymore." I glance at the smoke detector again. "He was different. He made me feel like myself again, like the person I was before Tyler. And then everything just - stopped. Overnight. Like a switch."

Ava doesn't move, doesn't blink too much, doesn't do anything to break the fragile thread I'm handing her.

"I think something happened," I say, and here it comes, the shape of it rising up my throat like water finding a crack. But then I think of the text that arrived the second I deleted his number, the one that knew, that watched, and the words dry up before they reach my mouth. "I think someone's watching me," I finish instead, so quiet I'm not sure she hears it. "Here. In this apartment."

Ava's brow tightens. "Watching you how?"

The door swings open.

Sophie comes in bright as a struck match, cheeks pink from the cold outside, a takeout bag swinging from her wrist. "Oh my god, you will not believe what happened at the dining hall," she says, already crossing the room, already inserting herself into the exact center of the air between me and Ava like she was engineered to land there. "They ran out of the good bagels and this freshman literally almost cried about it, it was the funniest thing I've ever - "

She stops. Looks between us. Reads the room a half second too late or exactly on time, I can't tell which anymore. Her eyes drop, just for a beat, to the textbook lying untouched on the coffee table - the same one I've been using as cover for twenty minutes - and something flickers across her face, quick as a struck match going out, before she looks back up.

"Wait, am I interrupting something?" Her phone buzzes in her pocket. She doesn't check it. She doesn't need to.

The door that had been cracked open in me, the one Ava had been so carefully, patiently prying at, swings shut with an almost audible sound. I feel it physically, a pressure change in my ears, the way a room feels different right before it storms. Four sentences. I got four sentences into something that might have saved me, and Sophie walked in at the exact wrong second with her bagel story and her bright pink cheeks, and now the moment is gone, folded up and put away someplace I won't find again tonight.

"No," I say, and my voice has already rebuilt its wall, brick by brick, in under two seconds. "Nothing. Just talking."

Ava looks at me for one more beat, something unreadable passing behind her eyes, disappointment maybe, or worry, or both braided together. Then she stands, smooths her jeans, and says, "I should shower," in a voice that gives nothing away.

Sophie flops onto the couch where Ava had been perched, entirely oblivious or entirely aware, already peeling open the takeout bag, already talking about the freshman again, about the bagels, about nothing, filling the room back up with noise before the silence can settle and mean something. I watch her hands as she talks - steady, easy, unbothered - and I wonder, not for the first time, whether her timing is an accident or a mechanism, some small cruel gear turning exactly when it needs to. I hate myself a little for wondering it, and I hate myself more for not being sure. I don't ask about the phone. I don't ask why she looked at the textbook like she already knew what it was hiding. I just file it away with everything else I'm too afraid to say out loud.

That night I can't sleep. I lie on my back and watch the ceiling do nothing, count the water stains I've memorized without meaning to, listen to the radiator tick its slow metallic song. Around midnight I hear something slide against my door, paper against wood, faint enough that I almost mistake it for the building settling.

I get up. My feet are bare on the cold floor and the hallway light under the door throws a thin gold line across a folded note lying just inside the threshold like it fell from nowhere.

I pick it up. Unfold it. The handwriting is looping and familiar, a handwriting I've seen on borrowed lecture notes and coffee shop napkins a hundred times before.

*Whenever you're ready. No judgment. - A.*

For one full second my entire body goes cold, ice water dropped straight down my spine, because my brain doesn't process the letter as an initial. It processes it as a name I don't want to think, a name that starts with the same sound, and for that one second I stand in the hallway convinced the world has just cracked open at my feet.

Then it resolves. A for Ava. Just Ava. Her handwriting, her kindness, her patience finally finding a way to reach me that doesn't require me to perform an answer in real time.

I laugh, one short broken sound, more air than humor, and press the note flat against my sternum like I can push the panic back into my ribs with it. My heartbeat is still going too fast, still catching up to what my mind already knows.

I carry the note back to bed with me, turning it over in the dark like a stone I can't put down - and that's when I see it. Tucked into the fold, so small I almost missed it the first time: a second scrap of paper, no handwriting at all, just three printed words cut from something else entirely and taped to the inside crease.

*I see everything.*