Near Elm Hall. More than usual. Your girl.
The library. Third floor. Not alone.
I think about Adela's hands on my blanket. The water cup. The window.
I think about the way she said of course when I asked if we were okay. Two words, perfectly delivered, exactly right.
Adela Kalkaska is many things. She is beautiful, composed, and trained from birth to perform with grace under pressure. I have always loved that about her. I chose her partly because of it — a girl who can sit at a table with people she despises and make them feel chosen. That's not nothing. In the world I come from, that's almost everything.
But she is not a liar.
She never learned how because she never needed to.
The girl who sat on the edge of my hospital bed today was lying. Fluently. Completely. Without a single visible seam.
Something happened to her while I was gone.
Someone happened to her.
I reach up and press two fingers against the bridge of my nose and breathe. In. Out. The way my father taught me when I was twelve years old, after I lost my first moot court exercise, and wanted to put my fist through the wall. Emotion is a resource, he said. Spend it where it earns something. Everywhere else, you save it.
I save it now.
Instead, I think about Beckett.
Beckett, whom I have known since freshman year. I brought him into my orbit because he was useful — steady and smart and the kind of loyal that doesn't ask too many questions. Beckett, who stood in the hallway the night of the party and introduced himself to Adela with those blue eyes and that careful expression. Beckett, whom I trusted with proximity because I never thought proximity was a risk.
I was wrong.
And I don't make the same mistake twice.
My ribs pull when I breathe too deep. I let the pain sit there, clear and useful, a small, regular reminder. In the window, the city glitters indifferently.
She transferred here for me. Months of planning. A surprise she never got to give. She moved her entire life to this campus, and then I ended up in a bed, and she was here alone, and someone — Beckett, the library, not alone, Elm Hall — was there.
I think about her face when she said we're okay. The steadiness of it. The perfect, terrible steadiness.
She's not the girl I left at the party.
Someone rebuilt her into something else while I was gone, and I don't yet know what that something is, and I don't know who else had their hands on what belongs to me.
But I'm going to find out.
I pick up my phone one more time.
I don't text anyone. I just hold it.
Outside the window, Seattle breathes its cold, wet breath against the glass, and I lie here in the quiet and make myself a promisethat I don't say out loud because promises made out loud are promises that can be held against you.
I am going to find out everything.
And then I am going to remind every single person in this world exactly who she belongs to.
For the first time since I woke up, I close my eyes and fall asleep easily.
Chapter 34: Theo
Sheleftthebookon the table.
