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We’ve been doing it for weeks. The public version of us — the version we were before New Year’s, except now it’s a deliberate costume instead of our natural state. We’ve gotten very good at it. The banter lands right. The antagonism reads as genuine. The guy in the beanie still thinks we hate each other. His girlfriend thinks we’re secretly in love. The actual truth is somewhere in a Burlington hotel room that neither of them will ever know about.

Today Dr. Adler covers unreliable narrators. The technical term is unreliable narrator, which I’m not going to let live in my head too long. At one point she says: the most interesting unreliable narrators are the ones who are telling you the truth about everything except the thing that matters most. I write it down. I don’t let myself look at the person diagonal to me.

He looks at me anyway. I feel it.

After class, in the hallway, we fall into step. The hallway goes one direction. We both go that way. Publicly, we’re arguing about the assigned reading. I found it more interesting than expected. He found it less interesting than expected. That’s a reversal of our normal positions. It’s irritating to us both.

“The unreliable narrator thing is not new,” he says.

“It’s not supposed to be new. It’s supposed to be instructive.”

“It’s not instructive if you already know it.”

“Did you know it?”

A pause. “Most of it.”

“Most. There it is.” I give him the smile. The blade one. “The part you didn’t know is the whole point of the chapter.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it. The corner of his mouth moves. “Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re doing the face.”

“I have one face.”

“You have about eight,” he says. Which is rich. I’ve identified at least four scowls on him. We argue about this until the hallway forks. We go our separate ways. I walk to my next class with the argument still warm in my chest.

And this — this, the this I refuse to name — this is the part that’s gotten dangerous. Not the hotel rooms. Not the study-room chairs. This. The arguing in hallways. The six a.m. texts. The way his schedule moved into the margins of my week without being invited.

The sex I could keep in a box. This I cannot.

I make it to Sunday dinner.

Which feels like a small triumph. I’ve been avoiding it since January. But the excuses ran out around Burlington. Sloane’s been doing the patient-waiting thing. The one that means she’s given me plenty of rope and is now quietly waiting to see what I do with it.

The table is the whole disaster of them. Beau at the head. Sloane beside him. Cash workshopping a decision he’s already made, involving an off-campus party. Wyatt eating with the focused serenity of a man who’s decided not to have opinions about Cash’s decisions. And Theo at the far end. Present without taking up conversational space. Which used to read as antisocial. Now it reads as something else. Something I understand because I know how he does the other version. The one nobody in this room has seen. The knowing sits in my chest like a stone that’s gone warm.

I sit across from Sloane. I’m public Margo — bright, easy, present. The one who catches Cash’s latest scheme and redirects it. Who asks Wyatt about the game. Who compliments Sloane’s chicken thing. She made too much and is now pushing it at everyone like a woman who loves through food and won’t be told otherwise.

“You’re actually here,” Sloane says. Quiet. Just for me. Cash has taken over the table.

“I am actually here.”

“Was starting to think you’d moved to Priya’s.”

“Priya’s is eleven minutes away.”

“Mm.” She takes a sip of her wine. “How’s the ethics project coming?”

Not a question. Not quite. Sloane’s questions are rarely what they’re shaped like. I give her the medium-bright smile. Half real. “It’s getting somewhere,” I say. Which is true in more ways than she’s technically asked about.

She looks at me. The look — I see you, and I’m not making it a thing, and I’ll be here when you’re ready. Then she looks away. Says something about the chicken. I breathe.

Across the table, Beau does the same thing to Theo. A look. Brief. Gone before Cash notices. Theo’s face does nothing. He’s excellent at nothing. But I know what’s behind the nothing. Beau knows. Sloane knows that Beau knows. The whole table is carrying this thing in plain sight while Cash talks about a party. There’s something so absurd and so tender about it. I have to look at my plate before my face gives the game away.

I love these people. I love Sloane — I’ve always loved Sloane. But this — the whole warm chaotic table, the boys who are Beau’s and somehow became available to the rest of us — I didn’t budget for any of it. It’s in the margins now. Same as his schedule. Same as everything that’s been quietly moving in without asking.