Something flickers across his face that isn't quite surprise. That's the part that sticks. Ashton has been my best friend for four years. The look on his face is not quite surprise.
"You knew," I say.
"I didn't know. I suspected." He rubs his hands over his face. "She had that look before we left. Like she was building up to something."
"And you didn't tell me."
"Because I didn't know. I didn’t ask.”
I look around the room. Crew is very focused on the television. Pierce has returned to his pasta with a dedication that suggests he would rather be somewhere else. Holden's phone has apparently become the most interesting thing he's ever seen.
"All of you knew something was off."
No one answers, which is its own answer.
I turn around and go upstairs before I say something I'll regret. I'm not angry at them. Not really. But I am pissed.
They didn't do anything. They saw what they saw, and they kept quiet. Crew didn’t think it might be worth a minute of his time to call and tell me my girlfriend moved out? Mention she was packing her shit while I was two thousand miles away and couldn't do anything about it?
My room is exactly the same as I left it—bed unmade and my gear bag kicked into the corner.
I sit on the edge of my bed and look at my phone. No new messages. No missed calls. The text I sent is still sitting there with its single blue check mark, unread.
I crafted my speech on the plane, and it was all for nothing.
I stare at the wall between my room and hers.
During two weeks of development camp, I didn't sleep more than five hours straight. Every morning, I woke up reaching for my phone, and found that she'd sent something small and meaningless. A photo of the coffee she was drinking, a picture of the weather, or a dog she saw while on a run. Sometimes, just a simple text that saidgood morningorgood luck. Every one of those small messages felt like enough. It felt like proofthat we were okay—just busy. We were both waiting for the conversation. It was supposed to be a beginning, not an end.
I scroll back through the thread now. The last message she sent me was last night. A photo of the forensics lab at six in the morning, with a caption that saidthe building is haunted, sending proof.I texted back a ghost emoji, and she sent a string of them, then nothing.
It seemed normal. I assumed she was back on campus and all was well.
She said we’d talk when I got home. That implied she'd be here.
She's not here.
I call one more time. Voicemail again. I sit with the phone in my hand. I don't leave a message because there's nothing I can say into the void of a recording that brings her back. Nothing that fixes what I wasn’t aware was broken.
Chapter Two
SUTTON
The apartment smells like someone else's life.
That's the first thing I noticed when I moved in three days ago.
Someone who really loved garlic and onions. The walls stank. The place was cheap, and apparently, the landlord didn’t think there needed to be paint jobs in between for student housing. The building was privately owned, but the school leased it to help with overflow. Lucky me, the poor sap who lived here lost their scholarship and had to leave school.
That’s what the building was. The poor kids were all shoved in here. The cleaning and cooking staff were also housed in the small building. It was just another reminder of our place in Avalon.
The building is probably as old as the town, and only minimal updates have been made. The heat is from one of those wall radiator things that gurgles and hisses. The hardwood floors look like the Grand Canyon, and the walls are covered in ugly green paint.
I bought a candle from the drugstore on the corner, the kind that claims to smell like clean linen, which it doesn't. It smells like clean linen, the way an air freshener shaped like a pine tree smells like a forest. There isn’t enough Febreze in the world to kill the garlic and onion smell. Which isn’t bad normally, but it smells rancid.
The apartment is small. It has one bedroom, one bathroom, and a kitchen that is basically just a wall of the living room with a counter dividing them. The window above the sink looks out at the side of another building.
But complaining doesn’t make it better. That’s what my dad always says.
