Julian finds me in the parking lot.
"Adela."
"Don't."
"You don't know what that was—"
I turn around. "We know exactly what that was, Julian."
He stops.
"I know it." My throat burns, but I swallow it down. "And I know he never sounded like that with me."
Julian's jaw tightens as he looks away.
"Did you know?" I ask.
"Adela—"
"Did you know?"
He looks back at me, and something crosses his face — not guilt exactly, but proximity to it. "We all knew Cody wasn't—" He stops. Closes his mouth.
"Wasn't what?"
He doesn't finish. And that unfinished sentence is heavier than anything he could have said.
"This is probably why he's in that hospital bed," I say. My voice doesn't shake. I almost wish it would — the steadiness feels wrong. "He was living an entire life I didn't know about. And I transferred here. I rearranged my entire life, Julian."
"I know."
I glance up. “If you knew… How can I trust you? How do I know you didn’t put him in the hospital?”
Julian flinches. "You can’t be serious, Adela."
I look at him. "Someone who knew him did this to him. Someone who knew enough to be angry."
"Cody is my best friend," he argues.
"And that’s why you didn’t tell me he was cheating on me? Is that why you’ve always made your little crush on me known?"
He doesn't answer, doesn’t even meet my eyes.
And then he says, “I would never do that to Cody. And I didn’t want to see your heart get broken. I tried to warn him that this wouldn’t end well, and now look.”
I get in my car. He stands in the lot and watches me go, and I don't look back in the rearview.
I drive for a while without direction.
I pass Maeve's name in my contacts. I can't let her be right. I can't face the friends who might have known, or the ones who definitely didn't, and explain what I saw in that flickering, dark, inconclusive video that I still can't stop hearing.
I stop at a red light.
He doesn't ask. He just takes.
Beckett’s voice lingers in my mind. He said it like he was telling me something I was almost ready to hear.
I grab my phone and find Beckett's name.
