The version of herself that existed before.
The sight of it moves through me in a way I wasn't prepared for, and I stand in the doorway for a moment just taking inventory. The room is clean. Not the performative clean of someone who tidied for company, but the natural order of a person who is functioning again. Books on the desk instead of the floor. The curtains open. A half-eaten bowl of something on the nightstand.
She looks up.
Her expression shifts immediately from open to guarded. "What are you doing in here?" She closes the laptop halfway. "You're supposed to knock."
"Your room is clean."
"Get out, Theo."
I step inside and close the door behind me.
Her jaw tightens. "I said—"
"I heard you." I lean against the door and look at her — at the color in her face, at the way she's sitting, at the brightness in her eyes that I recognize, and that has nothing to do with recovery and everything to do with something that is going to be a problem. "You seem good."
"I am good." Her chin lifts slightly. "Is that not allowed?"
"It's allowed." I push off the door, deciding something. "Give me your phone."
"Absolutely not."
"Nessa."
"No." She pulls it off the nightstand and tucks it behind her like we’re twelve. "You don't get to come in here without knocking and demand my phone. I'm not a child."
"I know you're not a child."
"Then stop treating me like one."
I cross the room.
She scrambles back on the bed, and I reach past her and get my hand around the phone before she can slide it further.
Her screen is locked. I know her passcode. She thinks I don't, but I've known it for two years, the same six digits she's used since she got her first phone, because Nessa is brilliant in every way except the ways that involve self-protection.
I put the code in while she screams at me to stop. I sit on her while she flails and cries.
I go to her messages.
I find his name before I find anything else because it's at the top of the list, the most recent conversation, the one she's been in today.
Cody.
The blood moves through me differently for a moment.
I glance at her.
She's watching my face, and I can see her deciding whether to defend it, wait me out, or try to take the phone back. She settles on something in between, which is to meet my gaze directly without flinching, which is the most Nessa thing possible and the thing I love most about her and the thing that is going to get her destroyed.
"Theo," she says. Steady. Careful. "Listen to me—"
"What did I tell you?" I say.
Not a question.
"He's different," she says. "He's been through something, and he's—"
