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He looks at her, eyes searching hers. Understanding, knowing, falls across his features. “Emily, I have this under control.” He is pleading, desperate.

“I can’t—I can’t let you do this anymore.” She speaks with a tremor, but she doesn’t look away. “I can't let you take the blame. I told you I’d fix it. That I’d make it right. But it’s not right. It’s not even close.”

She looks at me then, tears falling rapidly now.

“I did it. I poisoned her,” she admits without faltering. “I started a month ago. Maybe a bit longer.”

“Em, no one knows about the poison,” Baryn says, desperate.

Theo looks at me, hesitant at first, then seems to make the decision in real time. He stands, approaches Emily like a cornered animal, and wraps his fingers around her wrist, holding her hand up in front of her own face. In front of Baryn’s.

He peels off the bandage she’s had wrapped around her hand since our first night here because of the cut from the glass.

Her fingers are red and tender, the skin slightly peeled in spots, like old blisters healing.

“We know,” Theo says. His next words are clinical. He doesn’t look at me when he says them. Each one that spills from his mouth makes my throat close up just a little more.

“I saw the first tox report. The one missing from Henry’s file. I couldn’t let it go. I started digging into hellebore. Reading everything I could get my hands on—case studies, autopsy reports, toxicology breakdowns. I needed to understand it. To see how it fit.

And one of the things I kept finding is that handling it in raw or lightly processed form can cause blistering. Severe skin irritation. Especially when it’s absorbed through broken skin. And the shape of hers—the placement on her fingers⁠—”

He swallows. “They matched. I noticed it at dinner.” His gaze drops to her hand. “It looks worse now that it’s drying out. More noticeable. But I knew what it was almost immediately.”

Something inside me fractures further. I can’t stop myself from saying, “You let me chase every wrong lead. You let me look like an idiot while you stood there and waited for me to catch up.”

My voice cracks on the last few words, shame flaring hot under my skin. Not just because I missed it, but because he didn’t trust me to see it for myself. Because he decided I wasn’t ready. Because he made that decision alone.

He looks at me, finally releasing Emily’s hand. “That’s not what I was doing, Lila.”

“Then what were you doing, Theo? Because from where I’m standing, it looks a hell of a lot like you didn’t trust what I would do with the information.”

He moves away from Emily, hands loose at his sides. It’s a careful movement. Measured. The kind you make when you’re approaching something that is both fragile and volatile.

He reaches for me, but I pull away before I can think not to and the hurt that flashes across his face almost matches the one that’s currently splitting me in half.

“I trust you more than I have ever trusted anyone,” he says anyway.

The words punch a hole straight through me.

I look at him, and all I can think is—then why didn’t you trust me with this? Why didn’t you trust me to do the right thing even if it was Emily?

He steps toward me again, almost like he can’t stand the space between us. Like he knows I need space but he can’t bring himself to leave me completely alone in it. It would be easier if he was defensive, if he snapped, if he gave me something to shove against. But he doesn’t. He just stands there, steady in the way I can’t bring myself to be right now.

“She’s your friend,” he says. “Your best friend. You’ve already lost Laurel. I didn’t want to be the reason you looked around for Emily and saw another empty space in your world.”

I inhale deeply, but it doesn’t quite help. Something ugly and aching swirls in the pit of my stomach.

“I was trying to protect you,” he says, reassuring me again. “Not from the truth. But from what it would mean if I shared my hunch and it turned out that I was wrong. Blaming her for something she didn’t do, or even questioning her about it all would have ripped your friendship apart from the inside out. I needed to be certain.”

I want to scream. Or cry. Or throw something that will shatter.

But I don’t.

Because he’s not wrong about any of this. He’s just right in a way that fucking sucks.

It’s the type of hurt that comes when someone sees a part of you you were trying to keep out of sight—not out of shame, but necessity. When they notice something you couldn’t afford to examine too closely yourself.

He wasn’t trying to deceive me. He was trying to brace me for another instance of my life falling to pieces when I’d barely recovered from the last time.