The words echo in the car, ugly and brittle.
“Okay,” he says softly.
The word lingers on my tongue, heavy with guilt.
I should apologize for snapping at him. But I don’t say it, because he doesn’t realize that for weeks now I’ve been out of sync with the two people I used to rely on. That Sam and Aubrey are now caught up in their own little worlds.
He doesn’t know I’ve been walking the halls alone. Sitting alone. Eating alone. Telling myself it’s fine, that this is what happens, that people grow, and that it’s normal.
He doesn’t realize I kept waiting for one of them to look up and notice.
They didn’t.
But he did.
And that’s the part that messes with my head, because Jace Cooper is not supposed to be the one who sees me. He’s the guy girls cry over in bathrooms, not the one who sits beside you in a hospital room, holding your hand because you can’t breathe.
He shouldn’t be the one I lean on, the one making me feel less invisible. And yet, he noticed I wasn’t myself in the library. He noticed the way my voice cracked on the phone.
Jace fucking noticed.
The car continues moving. Streetlights flicker across the windshield in slow, fragmented waves.
I turn my head to look at him.
His eyes are focused straight ahead. Hands steady on the wheel, fingers loose but controlled. No arrogant tilt of his mouth. Only silent focus.
Jace looks older like this. Not the guy who lounges back in cafeteria chairs and runs his mouth. The one who smirks, talks about sex and acts like he doesn’t give a shit about anything.
“I didn’t mean to snap,” I say.
His eyes flick to me for half a second.
“I know,” he says.
He shifts his focus back to the road and pulls into my street.
The lump in my throat hurts as familiar houses drift by. Same mailboxes, same cracked pavement. The broken streetlight halfway down the street.
Jace slows the car, the indicator ticking softly in the quiet, then turns into my driveway.
The headlights sweep over the front of the house, illuminating the small garden bed by the porch that Dad keeps promising he’ll fix properly someday.
Jace parks the car and turns off the engine.
Neither of us moves.
The headlights dim, and for a moment, sitting in the dark, I wonder how I’m supposed to walk into that house and pretend I’m not terrified out of my mind.
The dashboard lights glow faint blue across his face, softening the hard edges. I notice the way his thumb taps once against the steering wheel. The only sign that he’s not as unshaken as he appears.
Jace walks me to my front door, with my keys still clenched in his hand. He doesn’t rush me. He stays close enough that if I tipped sideways, he’d catch me.
The porch light flickers as we step into its glow.
Jace steps in front of me, unlocks the door, pushes it open, and steps inside.
The lights are off. The house seems... hollow. The air smells different, like grief slipped in through the cracks while we were gone and settled into the walls.
