All Chapters of ONE LAST TEXT: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

"Ma'am, you're going to want a bigger bag."I looked up. The cashier at Baker's Pharmacy was maybe sixteen, gum snapping, staring at the mountain of prenatal vitamins and ginger candy sliding toward her on the belt like she'd caught me buying evidence."I'm good," I said and zipped my jacket up another inch even though it was eighty degrees outside and I was one bad decision away from heatstroke."It's summer," she said."I run cold."She didn't believe me,nobody ever believed me. I paid, grabbed the bag before she could ask anything else, and pushed out through the sliding doors into air that smelled like hot pavement and somebody's cigarette three cars down.My phone buzzed in my pocket.Priya:did you see this phonegate thing going aroundPriya:apparently a software bug is sending people's old unsent drafts. like YEARS old. my cousin got exposed for a text he never sent his landlord calling him a slumlordI laughed out loud, alone, in a parking lot, like a crazy person.me: that's i

The phone kept buzzing against my hip like it had a heartbeat of its own."Answer it," Eli said."Eli.""Answer it, Mia, or I will."I pulled it out with a hand that didn't feel like mine anymore. A name lit up bright on the screen even in the sun, sitting above two green buttons, one I hadn't seen in six months.I turned my body before Eli's eyes could land on it. Not far. Just enough that the screen faced the parking lot instead of him, my shoulder a wall between his face and mine."Who is that," he said."I have to take this.""Who is that, Mia."I didn't answer. I hit the green button and put the phone to my ear and stepped away from him, one step, then another, until there was a car's length of hot asphalt between us."Hey," I said, quiet, my back half turned to Eli, my whole body angled like I could physically block the conversation from reaching him."Mia, hey. Sorry, I know this is out of nowhere." His voice sounded rushed, breathless, like he'd been pacing a room somewhere. "

I got to the door before my mom did.Jordan was standing on the porch with his hand halfway raised like he'd been about to knock and lost his nerve at the last second. He looked different than I remembered. Thinner. Tired in a way that lived somewhere deeper than his face, in the set of his shoulders, in the way he stood like he'd forgotten how to take up space without apologizing for it."Hey," he said."Hey."Neither of us moved. Behind me I could feel my mom hovering in the kitchen doorway, not coming closer, not leaving either, watching this like she wasn't sure yet whether she needed to step in."Can I come in," Jordan said. "Or is that not, I don't know, is that not okay right now.""You drove twenty minutes to ask me that on the porch?""I drove twenty minutes because Eli called me an hour ago sounding like his whole world caved in, and when I asked him what happened he just said "ask Mia" and hung up on me. He's my best friend, Mia. He doesn't do that. He doesn't just hang up

Jordan's pov The room they took me to wasn't an exam room. It was smaller than that, a few chairs arranged around a low table with a box of tissues sitting on it like furniture, and I understood before anyone said a single word that rooms like this existed for exactly one purpose, and it wasn't good news.My mom was already in there. Still in the paper gown, a cardigan pulled over it now, sitting very straight in her chair the way she always sat when she wanted to look stronger than she felt. She looked up when I walked in and her face did something I'd never seen it do before, a kind of softening that was really just her trying to get ahead of my reaction before I'd even had one."Hey, baby," she said."Hey." I sat down next to her instead of across, close enough that our knees touched, and I reached over and took her hand without thinking about it, the way I'd done since I was small enough that her hand used to swallow mine whole instead of the other way around.Dr. Osei sat across

Eli's povI found Marcus Webb at the coffee shop on Fifth, the one he always studied at because he said the wifi was faster there than the library, and I'd been sitting across from him for ten minutes before I actually said what I'd come to say."You were at that party," I said. "Back in January. The one at Danny Ruiz's house."Marcus looked up from his laptop like I'd startled him out of a different century entirely. "Yeah, I mean, I was there for like an hour. Why?""I need you to think back. Hard. Anything you remember from that night, especially anything near the bathroom in the back hallway."His face did the thing I'd started to recognize over the last week, the careful, uncomfortable blankness of somebody who knew exactly what I was asking about and didn't want to be the one who answered it."Eli, man, that was months ago.""I know how long ago it was.""Why do you even care now? I thought you two were done." He said it gently, which somehow made it worse than if he'd said it c