"I mean, people talk." She says it carefully, like she's handing me something fragile. "You know how it is. New girl on campus, she's your girlfriend, people notice who she's spending time with."
"What are people saying?"
"Nothing specific. Just." Another pause. "That she's not exactly keeping a low profile for someone whose boyfriend is in the hospital."
I look out the window at the manicured grounds below.
"Thank you," I say. My voice is warm. Grateful. Exactly what she needs to hear. "I appreciate you looking out for me."
"Of course." She exhales, relieved, the tension of the conversation releasing now that she's been thanked. "Are you feeling better? You sound better."
"Every day," I say.
We talk for three more minutes about nothing. I ask about her classes. I laugh at something she says. I am completely present and completely elsewhere simultaneously.
I hang up and set the phone on the windowsill.
Not Theo.
Someone else.
I think about this carefully. Beckett near Elm Hall — that's one thread. Serena saw him more than once, which means more than once. And now a second thread — a man in the library who isn't on the team, who has been there with her repeatedly, who Serena can describe as dark and tall and serious but can't name.
Two threads.
Two men.
And Adela is moving between them on a campus she transferred to for me.
I pick up the phone again.
This time I don't call anyone.
I open the notes app, and I make a list the way my father taught me to make lists — not of feelings, not of grievances, not of the things I want to do to the people who put me in a hospital bed and apparently used my absence to help themselves to what belongs to me.
Just facts.
Clean, cold, numbered facts.
Beckett. Elm Hall. More than once.
Unknown male. Library. Third floor. Repeated contact.
Adela performing devoted girlfriend with no visible seams.
