When I come out, Ronan is holding my phone. Screen lit. Thumb on the message thread. He has the expression I imagine coroners wear.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
He doesn’t flinch. ‘Who is A? You dating a criminal?’
The blood leaves my face.
‘Give me my phone.’
‘You’ve deleted half this thread. There are gaps. Whole days missing.’ He scrolls. ‘But what’s left.I’ll miss you. Thinking about you.This isn’t a mate, Ewan.’
‘Give me my phone.’
I snatch it, and he lets me. The letting is worse than if he’d fought—it means he’s already read enough.
Silence. His face, my face. The Carrick bone is identical, doing identical damage.
‘Is it a teacher?’
It drops into the room like a brick through glass because he suspects, not because he knows.
‘No.’
‘Ewan. Is it.’
‘It’s not a teacher. It’s someone else. It’s private. And you had no right.’
‘Private. Right.’ He stands. Picks up his bag, the site jacket. ‘You’re eighteen years old and you’ve got a secret relationship with someone you won’t name who texts you things likeI’ll miss youand you’re deleting half the evidence. That doesn’t sound private, Ewan. That sounds like trouble.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I know what fear looks like. I’ve been watching it on your face all weekend.’
Both of us are in this cramped room, furniture too close. Ron’s chest is rising and falling too fast. Mine, worse.
He stands in the doorway. Hurt. Hurt. The skin is taut around his eyes, and the tension at his lips and his hands gripping the strap of his bag like it’s the only thing holding him upright.
‘I’ll find out,’ he says, below the threshold. ‘Whatever you’re hiding. I’ll find out.’
The door shuts—his footsteps down the corridor. The stairwell door is banging. Gone.
I sit on the bed. Phone in grip. The screen with the thread from A, the gaps where I’ve deleted, the scraps Ronan’s already read. The fragile architecture of a secret with a hole punched through its load-bearing wall.
Laurence, somewhere in Chorlton, marking papers, not texting, trusting the distance. He doesn’t know what happened in this room. Doesn’t know that his existence in my phone, reduced to a single letter, has been held up to the light.
I open the thread. Type:He knows.
Delete it, retype. Delete.
The ache of a body trained to need and then had it removed for seventy-two hours.
The screen goes dark. My reflection in the glass. Hollow. Wired.
Everything above it is still standing—just a matter of how long.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The door shuts, and I’m on him. My hands on his shirt, my mouth on his neck, three days of silence detonating on impact.
