Todos os capítulos de My Idol Lives Next Door (And He's Pretending to Hate Me): Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 28

Four days. Elara woke up counting them on her fingers and fell out of bed trying to count them twice. Mina's voice was already crackling from her phone. "Venue walkthrough at ten. Costume fitting at two. Bring snacks. Bring courage. Bring *everything.*" She was halfway through brushing her teeth when she noticed the ticket on her dresser. Seat A1. Front row, center. *FOR NO ONE.* She had propped it against the mirror last night, then moved it twice, then hidden it in a drawer, then taken it back out. Now she picked it up and turned it over, as if the back might have changed. *Don't wait for me afterward,* he had said. She slid it into the pocket of her jeans. Then she took it out and put it in her bag, and zipped the bag very carefully, like a girl with a secret. --- The concert hall was enormous. It rose out of the city like a glass ship, all balconies and curving stairs, with a stage so wide that Elara felt her knees go weak just standing in the wings. Rows of red

Elara woke up in her own bed with a wool coat folded over her feet and no memory of how she had gotten there. She sat up. Gray light filled the room. The coat was black, heavy, and smelled of cedar and cold night air, and a small card still lay in its pocket where she had left it. *THANK YOU FOR STAYING.* *R.* She read it four times. Then she put it back, pulled the coat around her shoulders, and went to find a hairbrush with the dignity of a girl who was not smiling. Three days to the concert. --- Visiting hours at the Hale Memorial began at two. "One at a time," said the nurse at the desk, a small woman with iron-gray hair and the posture of a sergeant. "Ten minutes each. Nobody sits on the bed. Nobody argues with the monitor." "We're his family," said Kai. "Then you know he needs rest." "We *will* let him rest." "You are shouting." "I'm *enthusiastic.*" She looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the five of them lined up in the corridor: Adr

At five in the morning, the conservatory smelled of wet earth and orchids, and Elara was bleeding into her sock. It was a very small amount. She sat on the edge of a stone planter with her left foot in her lap and the tape unwound, frowning at a blister the size of a coin. The glass walls were still dark. Beyond them, the garden lay gray and silent, and somewhere in the old house above her, the clock struck the hour with the weary politeness of a clock that had seen everything. Two nights of almost no sleep. Eight hundred repetitions of the same bridge. A closing slot, a second song, and four thousand tickets sold to people who wanted a masked stranger more than they wanted her. She pressed her thumbs against her eyes. *Breathe.* "You're bleeding on a hundred-year-old floor." She did not jump. She had, she realized, been listening for the sound of the door. He stood in the arch between the conservatory and the corridor, in a dark sweater with the sleeves pushed up, black mask i

"Marlow Junction," said Kai, reading the screen of his phone with the grim satisfaction of a man who had found a villain. "That's where they've stopped the train. Forty minutes from here by road. Maybe fifty, if the motorway's kind." "The motorway is never kind," said Elara. "Then I'll be unkind back." They stood on the empty platform under the red letters of the arrivals board. Behind them, a cleaner pushed a mop in slow, philosophical circles. Elara's phone showed 8:19. Yuna, on the other end of the line, was breathing carefully, like someone trying not to cry in a carriage full of strangers. "They're letting people off at Marlow," Yuna said. "The announcement says buses will come eventually. I don't think eventually is going to be today." "Stay on the platform," said Elara. "Don't move. Don't board any bus. Someone is coming." "Who?" "Kai." A pause. "The boy who threw a canapé at me once?" "At a stranger," said Kai, offended. "It was a misunderstanding. I'm a changed man.