The flush changes.
"I don't know."
"But you had it."
"For a day." She meets my eyes. She's decided on a version, and she's committing to it. "I didn't know the password, so I left it in your car."
"It's not in my car."
"I left it on your seat with your books. Just like I found it."
"You found it?"
She nods. "Your dad saw I hadn't left your side for some time. He told me to go home, and I wouldn’t, so when you went into surgery the first time, he sent me to get your car." She pauses. "I found it in the lot near the rink."
The world goes very quiet.
The rink.
I didn't drive to the rink that night. I went to Nob Hill, and I never made it back to my car, and the rink was not part of anything that happened that night in any version of events.
She's still talking. I hear her from a distance, the words coming through, but I’m not processing it.
She finds my face.
"What is it?" she asks.
Fuck.
I feel it in my face. The tell, the crack in the surface, the thing I let show for half a second before I pulled it back. She saw it, and she called it out. This is Adela, who has been studying me for two years, the same way I've been studying her, and I just handed her something without meaning to.
"What?" I say.
She shakes her head slowly. Her eyes move across my face. It’s unsettling and completely, devastatingly attractive the way she’s looking at me. "Did you not drive to the rink that night?"
I say nothing.
"Whose house is on Nob Hill?"
I stay quiet.
"Tell me."
I murmur, "Don't worry about it."
She steps closer to me.
The flush is gone. What replaces it is something I have not seen on her face before — not the composed Adela, not the performing Adela, not even the afraid Adela. Something with edges. Something that has been growing while I was unconscious and is now standing in my bedroom looking at me like I owe her an answer.
"You were in a coma for weeks, Cody."
"Not even two—"
"And I transferred to UW." She keeps going right through my interruption like it didn't happen. "I've been left with no answers, and then I realized that I have no idea what your life was like at UW because whenever we did have time for each other, we only talked about me. I’m dying for answers –– for anything. And your face just gave you away when I told you where I found your car."
I look at her beautiful, furious face. Those eyes that have always told me too much. Those lips that hesitated under mine downstairs, and I haven't stopped thinking about them since.
This is her. The real her is underneath the performance. She's been in there this whole evening, and I've been watching for her, and here she is — blazing and certain she deserves an answer.
