"Is he dead?"
Her eyes go wide. "No. God, no. I was just there. He's still—" She presses her hand to her mouth. "Sorry. Of course, you'd think that."
"Then what happened?"
She sits on the edge of the bed and takes a breath that doesn't quite finish. "He was cheating on me."
I watch her chest rise and fall too fast. The sound she makes trying to hold herself together — I didn't expect heartbreak to sound like this up close.
"How do you know?"
"His laptop. I found a file." She looks up. "I only watched a few seconds. That was more than enough."
I sit beside her, leaving distance between us. "Could have been old."
"It wasn't." She says it quietly, with the particular certainty of someone who recognized something they wish they hadn't.
I keep my face still.
Theo's wrong about her.
She is exactly what she appears to be — someone who built her whole life around a version of Cody that he performed for her specifically. And now she's sitting in a bare room in a city she moved to for him, holding the edges of that performance in her hands.
That complicates things.
"You were his teammate," she says. "Did you ever see him with anyone?"
"No."
The lie comes out clean. She nods and accepts it, which should feel like a win.
It doesn't, particularly.
"You should lie down," I say quietly.
She looks at me for a moment, reading my tone, my posture. Whatever she finds there seems to satisfy her, because she kicks off her boots and moves back on the bed.
I stay seated at the edge.
She reaches out and touches my arm — just her fingers, barely — then lets go when she realizes I'm not standing.
"Does this make you single?" I ask.
She stares at the ceiling. The thought clearly hadn't occurred to her until now.
"Are you going to stop visiting him?" I ask, reframing my question.
"I was thinking about it." Something hardens in her expression. "But that would make me a suspect, wouldn't it?"
"Probably."
She closes her eyes. "I can't stop going." A beat. "Even though I want to."
"Would you?" I ask. "If he were awake and well. Suppose you'd found out the same way. Would you walk away?"
She turns her head toward me. "He would be dead to me."
She means it. There's no performance in it, no heat — just the flat, certain clarity of someone who's crossed a line they didn't know existed until this moment.
