The machines breathe their steady rhythm. The IV drips. Outside the window, Seattle has gone dark, the city lights bleeding soft and orange through the glass, and I lie here in the silence that I've been waiting for since Adela walked through that door this morning and I felt something I couldn't immediately name.
I name it now.
Wrong.
Something was wrong.
Not obviously. Not in any way that the others would catch — Julian with his easy relief, Penelope with her coffee and her accidental bomb, Maeve with her arm through Adela's on the way out like she could hold her together through proximity alone. None of them saw it.
But I know Adela Kalkaska.
I have been studying her for two years; the way you study something you intend to keep. Every tell. Every micro expression. The way her jaw tightens when she's swallowing something she'd rather say. The way her eyes go to the middle distance when she's performing presence without actually being present. The way she touches things — her necklace, the hem of her sleeve, the edge of whatever surface is nearest — when her hands need somewhere to go that isn't her face.
She touched the blanket on my bed four times.
She straightened my water cup.
She looked at the window instead of me when she talked about the transfer.
A girl who moved her entire life to this city as a surprise for the boy she loves should not be looking at windows.
I stare at the ceiling and turn it over slowly, the way my father taught me to turn over evidence. Not with emotion. With architecture. What do I know? What do I not know? What are the spaces between those two things, and what lives inside them?
What I know: She transferred to UW. She's been here for weeks. She planned it before my birthday — months of planning, she said, a surprise she never got to give. My father's face when Penelope said it. That particular tightness around his eyes that he thinks he hides and never does. He knew she was here. He knew, and he didn't tell me.
That's its own conversation.
What I don't know: Everything else. Every day between my birthday and this morning. Every hour she spent on this campus that was supposed to be mine — my team, my rink, my city — while I was lying in a medically induced coma being kept alive by machines.
She was here.
Alone.
My jaw tightens.
I reach for my phone on the bedside table, moving carefully because my ribs still pull when I twist wrong, and my shoulder is still weak on the left side. Small reminders of what someonedecided to do to me. Small reminders that I have not forgotten a single second of that night, no matter what I told the detective, no matter what I let my father believe about the gaps in my memory.
There are no gaps.
I remember everything.
I remember the house on Nob Hill. I remember leaving the party after Adela and her friends were gone, walking back inside, the specific shift in the air that told me something was wrong before I could see what it was. I remember the hallway. I remember the first hit — clean, from behind, the kind of hit that knows exactly where to land.
I remember a voice.
I don't say any of that out loud. Not to the detective with his notepad and his sympathetic expression. Not to my father with his press statements and his careful management of my narrative. Not to anyone.
Because information is only useful if the other person doesn't know you have it.
My father taught me that, too.
I pull up Serena's contact and type: You awake?
The response comes in under a minute. She was waiting for me to reach out. She always waits for me to reach out. That's the thing about Serena — she has never once in her life pretended she isn't exactly where I left her.
Yeah. How are you feeling?
I stare at that for a moment. How am I feeling?
