"When?"
"Yesterday."
Silas absorbs that. He looks at his hands. "Does he—" He stops. Starts again. "How much does Cody remember?"
"I don't know."
We sit with that for a moment. The sound of the locker room moving around us — showers, voices, someone's music — while the thing neither of us is saying out loud takes up all the space.
Theo stands, picks up his bag, and walks out without a word.
The door closes behind him.
Silas looks at me. "We have a problem."
"Yeah," I say.
I look at the door.
"We do."
Chapter 32: Adela
Cody’shandfindsmyhair.
Slow, careful fingers moving through it the way he used to when we'd lie in the dark at his place and he thought I was already asleep. The gesture is so familiar that it makes my chest cave in, not from love but from recognizing something that used to mean everything, now means nothing except that he's good at this. He has always been good at this.
I keep my head on his shoulder and breathe.
The monitor beeps its steady, indifferent rhythm. Twelve beats. Thirteen. Fourteen. I count them because counting is something real to hold onto while everything else in this room is constructed. His warmth is real. The cedar scent of him underneath the hospital is real. The slight tremor in his hand when he first reached for mine — that was real, too.
Everything else I'm not sure about anymore.
"I kept thinking about your birthday," he says quietly. His voice is still rougher than usual –– weeks of disuse and tubes and whatever else they did to keep him here. "I keep going back to it. The way you looked when I came upstairs."
I close my eyes. "Cody."
"I mean it." His hand stills in my hair. "I should have stayed. I should have stayed and sung the song and stayed and none of this—" He stops. His chest rises sharply beneath my cheek. "I'm sorry, Adela."
The apology lands completely wrong.
He thinks he's apologizing for leaving the party early, for not being there when it happened, for putting me through weeks of hospital waiting rooms and unanswered questions and sleeping in his letterman jacket because it was the only piece of him I had left.
I don’t want his fucking apology for not staying. I’m glad I know what I know.
"It's okay," I say.
The words come out perfectly. Soft and forgiving and exactly right. My mother would be proud. Every charity dinner, everycampaign event, every smile held precisely long enough — she built this into me without knowing what she was building it for.
Turns out she was building it for this moment.
I have to pretend the monster under my bed is my Prince Charming.
She would be so proud.
“You remember my birthday? Do you remember that night?”
He pulls back slightly, enough to look at my face. I let him. I meet his eyes with everything carefully in place — the concern, the relief, the residue of weeks of fear. It's all there. None of it is wrong exactly. It's just not the whole picture.
