Fragile bones, iron hearts. のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 13

The phone buzzed on the carpet.Clarisse ignored it. She was curled on her side, knees tucked to her chest, staring at the wall. The crack in the screen had spread like a spiderweb, thin lines branching out from the point of impact. She'd thrown it hard. Harder than she'd meant to. The case had saved it from shattering completely, but the damage was there. Permanent.The phone buzzed again.She closed her eyes. The morning light pressed against her eyelids, pink and insistent. She'd barely slept. Every time she'd drifted off, the dream came back—the kitchen, the handhold, Devane's voice saying okay like it meant something. Then she'd wake, and the absence would hit her all over again.She didn't understand it.That was the worst part. She couldn't explain why Devane's silence hurt so much. They weren't friends. They weren't anything. Devane was just the daughter of the man her aunt married. A stranger who happened to live in the same house. A girl with cold eyes and a motorcycle and a

The hospital lights were too white. They made everything look like it belonged somewhere else — somewhere that wasn't real.Clarisse lay on the exam table while a nurse taped a cotton ball to the crook of her arm. Devane stood against the far wall, arms crossed, jaw tight, refusing to sit down. She hadn't left the room once. Not for coffee, not for air, not even when the doctor asked if she was family."She's my sister," Devane had said, and something about the way she said it made the doctor stop asking questions.The results came back an hour later. Blood work, normal. CT scan, clear. No aneurysm. No bleed. No tumor, no fracture, no explanation."Physically," the doctor said, choosing her words like she was walking across ice, "there's nothing wrong with her."Devane's voice was flat. "Then why did she collapse? Why was there blood?""Sometimes the body keeps score in ways we can't scan for." The doctor glanced at Clarisse, and there was something careful in her expression — the lo