I kept turning that over.
She had seemed fine.
Did I miss something? Should I have seen it?
And then the thought I’ve never quite been able to shake —
I wondered if Cassian regretted all the time he spent at my house.
All those afternoons at my kitchen table, in my pool, asleep on my living room floor. Time he could have spent next door. With her.
I’ve never asked him.
I’m not sure I want to know the answer.
• • •
My parents said we needed to give them space.
That tomorrow we’d bring breakfast, pay our condolences, let them know we were there.
I didn’t understand it. The idea of being alone after something like that made no sense to me. I’d grown up in a house where no one was ever left alone with anything hard.
We faced it all together.
But my parents know best.
So I wiped my face and went to bed.
• • •
I was almost asleep when I heard it.
Tap tap.
I was at the window before I was fully awake.
Cassian.
I took one look at him and felt something crack open in my chest.
Red eyes. The particular exhaustion that comes from crying for hours. A darkness around him I hadn’t seen before — something between anger and loneliness and something else I couldn’t place.
Cassian was not easy to read. Not like me — I wore everything on my face whether I wanted to or not.
He kept himself locked up tight, always had.
But in that moment I could see everything.
And it devastated me.
I opened the window without a word.
He climbed in silently.
We’d done this a hundred times — the window and him staying for a bit. But he’d always left before morning. Always held something back.
Not this time.
