All Chapters of Dark Secrets Between Roommates: Chapter 201 - Chapter 210

Chapter 202 AidenEric walked the tree line with his hands shoved in his pockets like he was doing me a favor just by breathing out here. Which, fine. Maybe he was.“Show me exactly where the note was,” he said.I pointed at the fence post near the edge of the property, right where the wood had started to gray and split from years of weather. He crouched down and looked at the dirt like it owed him money.“Footprints are gone,” he said. “Rain last night probably wiped them out.”“Great. So we’ve got nothing.”“I didn’t say nothing.” He stood back up and brushed his knees off. “I said the footprints are gone. I still know what my dad said.”“Then say it. All of it. Not the version you gave me over eggs this morning.”Eric looked at me for a second like he was deciding whether I’d earned the rest. I guess I had, technically, given what I’d agreed to just to get him talking in the first place. I hated thinking about that deal. I shoved it down and waited for him to start.“About three w

Chapter 204 ChrisAiden had been gone six weeks, and I spent most of them pretending I was fine.I want to be honest about that up front because I’ve spent enough of this whole thing lying to people I claim to care about, and I’m tired of doing it even in my own head. I was not fine. I got up every morning, went to my summer classes, showed up for my father’s Sunday dinners like a good son, and every single one of those things felt like moving through water that had gotten thicker since the last time I’d tried it.The apartment felt wrong without him in it, which was stupid, because he’d never actually lived there, not officially, he’d just been in and out of it enough times that some part of my brain had started treating it like his space too. I’d walk past the guest bathroom where I’d cleaned his cuts that one night and feel my chest go tight for no reason I wanted to look at too closely. I kept the black box locked in the same drawer. Never opened it. Told myself that was restrain

Chapter 206 JovianThe facility called it a wellness room, which was a stupid name for four white walls and a bed bolted to the floor so I couldn’t move it, but I’d stopped arguing about the names of things weeks ago. Arguing took energy I didn’t have, and every ounce of energy I did have went toward the one thing that actually mattered, keeping my head quiet enough that the other one didn’t get a chance to come out and ruin something else.They’d started calling it that, officially, in my third week here. Dissociative identity, not bipolar like my dad kept saying at first before the doctors corrected him in front of me like I wasn’t even in the room. He still says bipolar sometimes, out of stubbornness more than confusion, because bipolar is a word he can say at his country club without anyone flinching, and the real word makes people’s faces do something he can’t stand watching.Dr. Whitlow, my actual doctor, explained it to me slow and careful the first time, like I was something

Chapter 208JovianThey took Rian’s phone the same night I used it.The night aide caught me with it pressed to my ear in the corner of the rec room, and she didn’t even yell, which was worse. She just held her hand out and waited until I put it in her palm, and then she walked it straight to the nurse’s station like she was carrying a dead bird.I didn’t sleep. I lay there thinking about Aiden’s voice on the other end going higher and higher, and the way the call cut off in the middle of me telling him to find Eric, and I kept wondering if he heard that part or if the last thing he heard was just me saying “somebody’s coming” like some idiot in a horror movie.Rian didn’t show up to breakfast.He didn’t show up to group either, or to lunch, and by the afternoon I’d convinced myself they’d shipped him off somewhere worse because of me. I sat in the common room with my thumb running up and down the seam of my sleeve so hard I rubbed the skin red.He finally dropped into the plastic cha

Chapter 210RianEverybody in this building lies about something. The trick is picking which lie you can live with.I watched Jovian walk into his room that night and close the door without looking back, and I stood in the hallway a little longer than I needed to, staring at the dent in the wall with his blood still dried in the cracks. The aide yelled lights out a second time, louder, like I hadn’t heard her the first time. I heard her. I just didn’t care.I went back to my room and lay down on top of the blanket with my shoes still on, which is against the rules, and I touched the bandage over my eyebrow and thought about how easy it was.Not the push. The push hurt like hell. My head bounced off that door frame hard enough that I saw little white dots for a minute, and I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t scared, lying on the floor with Jovian standing over me looking like somebody had scooped him out and put a stranger in his skin.The easy part was after.He crouched down next to me