She turned to me and raised her eyebrows. I could see the question forming in her eyes:What is he doing here? Why were you standing so close? Why do you look like that?
“We had a... group project thing,” I said.
What did I just say? I just lied... badly. He goes to Kingswell—there’s no world where we would have a project together.
And I was still lying. Still covering up what I’d done.
“Okay...” Emily said, but her voice had an edge to it.
Fuck. She’s going to be pissed.
Silence stretched.
Alex cleared his throat. “I should go. Thanks for... the help. With the project.”
He didn’t look at me. Couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
He just walked past Emily, past me, toward the stairs. I watched him disappear around the corner without looking back.
When I turned back to Emily, she was staring at me.
“Group project?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“With Kingswell?”
“Well, not group... it was just—“
“Liam.” She stepped closer. “What’s going on?”
My throat felt tight. I couldn’t keep lying to her. Not after everything. She deserved better than that.
Better than me.
“Okay.” I ran my hand through my hair. “We deleted the video of the race tonight.”
Emily’s eyebrows drew together. “How?”
“It was on the Kingswell server. So we—“ I stopped. Swallowed. “We broke into Kingswell tonight. To delete it.”
The hallway went quiet and Emily just stared at me.
“You what?”
“We had to delete it before—”
“You broke into Kingswell?” Her voice rose slightly. “You broke into another school’s server?”
“Noah helped us. He had this whole plan—“
“Noah?” She stepped back. “You involved Noah in this?”
“It wasn’t like that. It was Noah’s—”
“You had to break the law?” Her voice was sharp now. Angry. “You had to commit actual crimes? Do you understand what could’ve happened if you got caught?”
“We didn’t get caught—”
