Just that.
Okay.
She picks up her coffee and looks out the window, and I watch her process it — not with fear, not with tears, with that cold, quiet intelligence that has been growing sharper every week since she got to this campus.
She came here for a boy who was already something she didn't know.
She stayed and became something none of us planned for.
"Beckett," she says, still looking out the window.
"Yeah."
"When the timing is right." She turns and looks at me. "Tell me everything."
It's not a question.
"Yeah," I say.
"Promise me."
I look at her across the table. At the girl who arrived on this campus with one suitcase and nothing on her walls and has been quietly, methodically, alone and without allies, assembling the truth out of fragments and margin notes and things people almost said.
"I promise," I say.
She nods once.
And just like that, she trusts me.
She finishes her coffee, and then she’s pulling her coat around her in the doorway, and I watch her go. Now I have to sit withthe weight of a promise I just made that is going to cost me everything I owe Theo.
My phone buzzes on the table.
Theo:You're not home.
I look at the message.
Then I look at the door she just walked through.
I type back:I'll be at skate on time.
I put the phone in my pocket, leave a tip on the table, and walk out into the cold gray morning, and don't tell him where I've been.
For the first time since any of this started, I don't tell Theo something.
It feels like the first honest thing I've done in months.
Chapter 37: Cody
Thephysicaltherapist'snameis Dana.
She's efficient and unsentimental and doesn't ask me how I'm feeling beyond what the shoulder and the ribs require, which is exactly what I want from her. She comes to the house every morning at nine, works with me for an hour, writes notes on her clipboard, and leaves. No small talk. No careful expressions. No one managing me.
I appreciate that more than she knows.
It's been three days since the hospital.
Three days of my father's house — the high ceilings, the imported silence, the quality of a home that has always functioned more as a backdrop for a certain kind of life than as a place where anyone actually lives. My room is exactly as I left it.My father has been careful about that. Nothing moved, nothing touched, the whole space held in suspension like a museum exhibit waiting for its subject to return.
