All Chapters of Our dirty little secret: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Chapter 92 SundayThe bus filled by half past seven.Bags went into the hold. Staff checked names. The class climbed on in the same loose groups they had travelled down with, quieter than Monday, more tired, already half pointed toward campus and laundry and the first lectures of the following week. Lena took a seat on the right side, midway back. Her roommates spread out nearby. Noah boarded, caught her eye, and took a place a few rows ahead with people from the overlapping cohort after a brief, private look that belonged to the viewpoint and the alcove and did not need an audience.Oliver got on late in the boarding order.The seat beside Lena was still empty. He paused for half a second in the aisle, then sat down in it without comment. Tessa was further forward on the opposite side with her seminar group. If she noticed the arrangement, she did not turn around.The bus pulled out of the station car park while someone at the front was still counting. The shore fell away behind the

Chapter 94Helen.The house did not recover its ordinary shape quickly.For the first hour after the doorway incident, everyone stayed in separate rooms. Oliver remained behind his closed door. Lena unpacked in slow, mechanical stages — dirty clothes into a pile, field journal onto the desk, charger plugged in — while the image of Helen and Julian on the couch replayed without mercy. Downstairs, low voices moved through the kitchen. Cupboard doors. Running water. The practical sounds of two people trying to erase a scene that could not be erased.Just after six, Helen knocked on Lena’s door.She looked composed again, hair brushed, dress changed, colour only faintly high in her cheeks. “I made tea. And there’s food if you want it. Nothing formal. I just… didn’t want you living off a packet of biscuits after a week away.”Lena followed her down.Julian was in the kitchen, sleeves rolled, moving through the ordinary tasks of plates and cutlery with deliberate calm. He met Lena’s eyes on

Chapter 96LenaThe house took the outing as permission to try again.Tuesday morning felt less radioactive than Monday. Helen moved through the kitchen without the brittle brightness of someone performing recovery. Julian kissed her temple on the way to the coffee pot and neither of them flinched at the contact. Oliver came down late, ate quickly, and left for campus with a muttered comment about a lecture that started too early. Lena followed twenty minutes later with her field journal in her bag and the residual stack of the week still sitting under her ribs: the station, the bus, the doorway, the botanical gardens, the deliberate attempt at ordinary.Campus had the slightly stunned energy of a cohort returning from compulsory fieldwork.People compared notes in corridors about residual marks from waterproof boots and whether the journal deadline was actually midnight or only “midnight-ish.” Noah was near the north entrance with coffee, as if the trip had not interrupted the patter

Chapter 98Lena.The rest of Wednesday sat under Lena’s skin like a bruise she could not stop pressing.She went to her remaining classes. She opened documents. She wrote the first lines of a response paper and deleted them twice. The image from the side corridor refused to thin: Tessa against the tiles, Oliver’s hand under her skirt, the soft broken sound of someone trying not to be heard. By the time the final seminar ended, the campus had taken on the flat light of late afternoon and Lena wanted only to be anywhere that was not a bathroom hallway.Noah was waiting near the south steps with his bag at his feet.“You look like the day won,” he said.“It did.”He fell into step beside her without asking where she was going. For a while they just walked the long way toward the main road, past the last clusters of students and the bike racks and the smell of cut grass from the maintenance crew. Noah did not fill the silence with questions. That, more than anything, kept her from snappin

Chapter 100Tessa.Friday started like it intended to behave.Lena got through her morning lectures without incident. She submitted a short response paper, bought a sandwich she only half finished, and sat on the low wall outside the arts building with her notebook open, pretending the day might stay simple. Noah texted once to ask if the film hangover had worn off; she replied that it had, mostly. The corridor from Wednesday and the look Oliver had given her on Thursday still sat somewhere under her ribs, but for a few hours they remained background noise.Then the afternoon schedule put her in the older block again.Her seminar ran late. By the time she stepped into the side corridor near the labs, most of the building had emptied into the gap before the next period. The same quiet stretch. The same thin light. Lena was only cutting through to the back stairs when she heard it — not the muffled sounds of the toilet cubicle this time, but something closer and clearer.Around the corn