for no one.

Coach Ben is sitting against the back wall when you duck through the gap in the logs. He doesn't startle. He doesn't do much of anything anymore, you've noticed — like a man who already knows which way the wind's blowing and has decided not to waste the energy fighting it.

"You shouldn't be in here," he says, but he doesn't say it like he means it.

"Probably not." You sit across from him, knees pulled up. The morning is gray and close, fog still caught low in the trees. "Trial's in a few hours."

"I know."

"You don't seem worried."

He looks at you then, and there's something almost gentle in it, which is the worst part. "Would it change anything if I was?"

You don't have an answer for that, so you don't try to give him one. Instead you reach into your jacket and pull out the small bone-handled razor you traded Gen a fish hook for last month, along with a sliver of soap you've been hoarding.

"What's that for."

"You look like hell," you tell him. "Figured you could use a shave before they parade you out in front of everyone."

"I'm fine."

"You're not. You look like you crawled out of a cave." You pause. "Which, I guess, you did."

He almost laughs. Almost. "I said I'm fine."

"I didn't ask."

You're already wetting the soap, working it between your palms, and he watches you with an expression you can't quite name — not quite suspicion, not quite gratitude, somewhere in the space between. He doesn't say yes. He doesn't say no again either. When you shuffle closer on your knees and tilt his chin up with two fingers, he lets you.

Neither of you talks while you work. The blade is dull, has been dull for months, and you go slow because of it, careful around his jaw, the new hollows in his cheeks that weren't there in October. His eyes are closed. His breathing is even. For a few minutes, it is almost peaceful — the scrape of the blade, the fog burning slowly off the tree line, the specific quiet of two people who both know there's nothing left worth saying and have decided that's all right.

When you're done you wipe the last of the soap off with your sleeve, and he opens his eyes and looks at you like he wants to say something. He doesn't. You don't either. You just nod, once, and let yourself back out through the gap in the logs, and that's that.

------

She's there when you straighten up outside the pen. Of course she is.

Jackie's sitting on a fallen log a few feet off, legs crossed at the ankle, chin propped in her hand like she's been watching the whole thing and forming opinions about it. The morning light goes straight through her, the way it always does, and you feel your chest do that familiar lurch — relief and dread arriving at the exact same moment, indistinguishable from each other.

You haven't seen her in weeks.

You'd started to think maybe that was it. Maybe you'd finally cried her out, talked her out, starved her out of whatever part of your brain kept conjuring her — and some sick, stupid, ungrateful part of you had grieved that too. Had wondered, in the dark, lying awake while Shauna's breathing went careful and even three feet away, if the silence was a kind of sentence. If you'd done something — said something, felt something for someone you shouldn't have — and this was Jackie's way of making you pay for it. Punishment by absence. The cruelest kind, because at least when she was needling you, you knew she was still there.

"A shave," Jackie says now, tipping her head. "Cute. Very tender deathbed scene. You should've lit a candle."

You don't answer her. You never do anymore — somewhere in the last few months you stopped trying, stopped flinching, stopped turning to make sure no one saw your lips moving at nothing. It doesn't fix anything. But it means the only thing in your head responding to her now is your own pulse, quickening, traitorous and glad.

"He's going to die today, you know," she goes on, falling into step beside you as you walk back toward the fire pit, the trial ground, the whole ugly machinery of it. "And you spent the morning making him pretty for it. That's almost romantic, in a deeply fucked-up way. Pretty on brand for you."

You keep walking. You don't trust your face right now, don't trust what it might do if you let it react — laugh, or crack, or something worse — so you just let her talk, let the words wash over you like static, like a radio left on in another room. It's not comfort, exactly, what you feel listening to her. It's something stranger than that. Something closer to company.

"Careful," she murmurs, close enough now that you can almost feel her breath, cold as it always is, against your ear. "People are starting to notice you talk to yourself less. They might think you're getting better."

You almost smile. You don't let yourself.

------

By the time the camp gathers, the fog's burned off and the sun is doing its best to make the whole grim ritual look less like what it is. Natalie's already got the antlers on, the gavel in hand. You find a spot near the back, arms crossed, and Jackie settles in beside you on a stump that doesn't actually hold her weight, legs swinging, utterly delighted with the spectacle of it all.

"Oh, this is going to be good," she says.

Mari goes first. You watch her describe the bats, the cave, the way Coach talked to people who weren't there — and something in your chest goes tight and complicated, because you know exactly what that's like, don't you. You glance sideways without meaning to. Jackie catches you looking and grins, delighted, like she knows exactly what you're thinking.

"Takes one to know one," she sings.

Misty tears into the cross-examination, and you tune in and out, watching the way the group leans toward each accusation like it's gravity. Does that sound like a cold-blooded murderer to you? No one answers her. No one has to.

Then Shauna takes the stand.

You straighten without meaning to. Beside you, Jackie goes quiet — actually quiet, for once, watching you watch her.

"Shauna, why exactly were you awake so late the night the cabin burned down?" Misty asks, and you can hear the trap being laid even before it springs.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Were you just sitting there doing nothing, or were you journaling? And what exactly were you journaling about?"

Your eyes are on Shauna's face. You don't look away once, not when Misty pushes harder, not when Taissa objects, not when Shauna's jaw sets in that particular way you know means she's holding something down by force. You know what's in that journal. You've seen the corner of a page once, by accident, words you weren't supposed to read, and you've never told her you saw it.

"No, I didn't!" Shauna snaps, when Misty asks her outright if she started the fire, and you believe her — of course you believe her — but you also watch the way her hands curl at her sides, white-knuckled, the same way they curled the night you found her at the grave with Melissa, the knife at someone's throat like that was just another kind of touch.

Then Taissa redirects, and asks her about the labor. About whether Coach was a hero.

"No. He didn't do a thing," Shauna says, and her voice goes flat in that way it does when she's protecting herself from feeling something all the way through. "He told me he just pressed play on a VHS tape and went right back to his room. He has judged us from the moment we crashed. He is not one of us, he hates what we've become, and he tried to take our lives to punish us."

You don't move. You don't breathe, for a second. You're thinking about the baby. About the grave only Shauna is supposed to know the location of. About the way she said no one helped me like it was a verdict on the whole world, and some small, useless part of you wants to stand up right there and say I would have. I would have helped you. I wasn't there but I would have.

You don't say it. Jackie, beside you, has gone very still, watching your face instead of the trial now.

"You still do that," she says softly. It's not a tease this time. "Look at her like she's the only fire left burning."

You don't answer that either. But you don't look away from Shauna until she steps down.

------

Lottie's testimony passes in a blur of motive and doubt — could it have been Gen? Could it have been you, Lottie, because the Wilderness rejected you? — and you watch Lottie absorb the accusation with that same unbothered calm she absorbs everything with these days, the same calm that used to unsettle you and now mostly just makes you tired.

"It could have been any one of us, for any number of reasons," Misty announces, and the crowd murmurs, and Jackie leans over and whispers, "Someone's been keeping up with Law & Order."

Then Natalie takes the stand herself, and the air changes.

"He wanted nothing to do with us!" Natalie says, defending the choice not to search for him, and you can see exactly how this is going to go before it goes there — the crowd turning, Shauna's voice rising up out of the murmur like a blade —

"How was that your choice to make?!"

— and it's chaos, shouting, Misty hammering the table, and you sit very still in the middle of it with your arms crossed and your heart doing something uncomfortable in your chest, because you know what's coming next. You know exactly what's coming next, and there's nowhere to put yourself where it won't find you.

------

Coach takes the stand. The crowd goes hostile and quiet at once, that specific silence that's worse than yelling.

"Coach Scott, why did you want to become a coach in the first place?" Misty asks, gentler than she's been with anyone all day.

"I didn't," he says. "I never wanted to be a teacher either. I spent nine years doing it just because we were the best in the state and I hoped it would lead to a better job offer."

"So you hated them? It was just a paycheck?"

"No. I grew to care about them." He looks around at all of you, and you make yourself hold still under it, the way you held still under the razor this morning. "They were relentless, stubborn underdogs, and I liked that because I'm an underdog too. If I wanted to hurt them, I knew secrets about every single one of them I could have used."

Something ripples through the crowd at that. You see Tai's spine go rigid. Van's hand finds hers without either of them looking at the other.

"I caught Taissa and Van together, that first month," Coach says, quieter now, like he's confessing it more than testifying it. "I never said a word. Wasn't my business. And Misty—" he glances at her, and something almost fond crosses his face, "—I made her equipment manager because I watched the way the other girls treated her, and I figured if she had a title, a job, maybe they'd leave her alone. Maybe she'd have somewhere to belong that wasn't earned by being liked." He pauses. "I chose to look out for them because my own parents never looked out for me."

He stops there. The fire pops. No one in the crowd says anything.

"But then we crashed," he goes on, and his voice changes, drops into something rawer. "You cut my leg off. You stopped listening to me. And then... you started eating each other. I became terrified that I was going to be next because I was no longer useful. I was a coward. I ran away and hid like my parents always did."

His eyes find Shauna's.

"Shauna, I am so deeply sorry I didn't help you. What you all have done to survive out here is incredible, and I didn't appreciate it. I don't understand your wilderness belief system, but I swear to God, I did not try to kill you."

Misty says, "No further questions," but nobody's really listening to her anymore. They're looking at him. Some of them — you can see it on their faces — are starting to soften.

That's when Taissa stands back up.

"One more thing," she says, and there's something sharp underneath her voice now, something she's been saving. "Coach Scott didn't disappear on his own. Someone encouraged him."

The whole camp turns.

"Someone sat with him, the morning of the fire, and convinced him to leave." Taissa's eyes find you. "Didn't they."

You feel your stomach drop straight through the ground.

"I—" Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to. Every face in the clearing is turned on you now, and you can feel Jackie beside you, gone completely still, watching with an expression you can't read for once. "I talked to him. That morning. Yeah."

"You told him to leave," Shauna says. It's not a question. Her voice is very even, very careful, and that's somehow worse than if she'd shouted.

"I—" You swallow. Your hands have gone cold. "I told him it wasn't safe for him here anymore. That he should try to find help. That's not the same as—"

"That's exactly the same," someone says — you don't even catch who, it doesn't matter, it's like the whole clearing said it at once.

"We weren't even listening to him anymore by then!" The words come out too fast, too defensive, stumbling over each other on the way out. "Not after the first week — he stopped — he wasn't part of anything, he wasn't hunting, he wasn't helping, he just sat there judging all of us with that look on his face, and I thought — I thought if he left, maybe he'd find rescue, maybe he'd bring someone back for us, I wasn't trying to — I didn't think he'd—"

You stop. There's nowhere good for that sentence to go.

Shauna is looking at you like she's never seen you before. Not angry, exactly — something colder than angry, something that scares you more.

"You knew he might burn it down?" she says.

"No. God, no. That's not—" Your voice cracks. "I didn't know anything was going to happen. I just wanted him gone. I wanted — I don't know what I wanted. I wanted it to not be my problem anymore."

The silence that follows is its own kind of verdict.

------

It's full dark by the time Natalie calls for the vote. The first round comes up short. The second too. You stand near the edge of the firelight with your arms wrapped around yourself, not looking at anyone, feeling Jackie's cold, steady presence at your shoulder like the only honest thing left in the clearing.

"They're all looking at you," Jackie murmurs. "You know that, right? Not him. You."

You don't answer. You don't have to. You can feel it.

Then Shauna starts in — he trapped us like rats, he set our shelter on fire while we slept inside, if you know he's guilty, raise your damn hands — and her eyes sweep the circle, and they land on you and stay there, waiting, demanding, the way they used to when she needed you to be on her side without question, the way you used to give it to her without question, every single time.

You don't raise your hand.

You watch something close behind her eyes when she sees that. Not surprise — she's too smart to be surprised, she probably knew before she even asked — but something quieter and worse, a door shutting somewhere you don't get to see into anymore. She doesn't say anything to you directly. She doesn't have to. She just looks away, toward the next person, the next hand she might be able to force into the air, and the not-saying-anything is so much louder than if she'd screamed.

Across the circle, you catch Nat watching you. She doesn't say anything either. She just holds your eyes for a second, and there's something in her face — recognition, maybe, or grief, or just two people who've both disappointed Shauna in the same night finding each other across a dark clearing — and it hurts in a way that doesn't have a name yet. You look away first.

The wind comes then, sudden and wrong, ice and leaves spinning up out of nowhere, and the fire screams sideways, and the whole camp goes still with a kind of religious terror that makes your skin crawl.

"It's a sign," Melissa breathes.

Hands start rising. Travis. Lottie. Akilah.

Jackie, beside you, watches the hands go up one by one with something like exhaustion on her face. "They'll believe anything out here," she says. "Wind. Ghosts. Whatever's easiest." She glances at you sideways. "You'd know something about that."

You still don't answer her. But for the first time all night, you let yourself almost smile — small, private, aimed at no one — because at least she came back. At least she's still here, needling you in the dark, and whatever that says about you, you're too tired tonight to be ashamed of it.

Natalie's gavel comes down.

"By majority decision... we find you guilty."

You watch Van step forward into the firelight and take hold of Coach Ben's arm. You watch him not fight it. You think of the razor this morning, the quiet, the way neither of you said anything that mattered and it was still the kindest thing you'd done for anyone in weeks.

The verdict lands and the air shifts — something releasing, something tightening, depending on where you're standing. Around you, people exhale or go rigid or drift toward each other in that instinctive animal way the group has developed out here, bodies seeking bodies in the aftermath of something hard.

You're still watching Natalie's face when you catch it in your peripheral vision.

Shauna and Melissa, standing close. Melissa's hand finding Shauna's in the dark, fingers lacing together — just for a moment, two or three seconds, the clasp of it deliberate and certain, like a period at the end of a sentence. And Shauna looking down at it, then looking up, that slow half-smile curving the corner of her mouth. Not triumphant, exactly. Something quieter than that. Something private.

Then Shauna's walking away, and Melissa is watching her go, and the whole thing lasted maybe as long as it takes to draw a breath.

You look away.

The feeling that moves through you isn't sharp. That's the worst part of it — you almost wish it were, wish it had edges you could name and press against and call by the right word. But it's the same dull, nauseating thing it's been for weeks now, that bitter low-grade weight sitting just under your sternum, the specific misery of watching something through a window you have no business looking through anyway.

You press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and breathe out slowly and don't let your face do anything at all.

Jackie, beside you, says nothing.

For once, you're grateful.

------

You give it an hour. Maybe more. You stay by the fire after the others drift off, feeding it sticks you don't need to feed it, watching the coals breathe orange and dim in the dark. Jackie sits across from you on the other side of the fire, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands, watching you back. She doesn't say anything for a long time, which is unusual enough that you notice it.

"Go to bed," she says eventually.

You almost do.

The hut is dark when you duck inside. You can tell by the quality of the quiet that Shauna isn't asleep — her breathing has a specific rhythm when she's actually under, something loose and unheld, and this isn't it. This is the careful, controlled stillness of someone lying very still on purpose, which is its own kind of statement.

You stand in the entrance for a moment, your eyes adjusting, and the silence between you is so thick with everything that happened today that you almost feel like you need to part it with your hands to get through.

You don't lie down.

Instead you pick up your extra layer from the floor, the wool blanket you'd kicked off three nights ago when the temperature spiked, and you stand there holding it and looking at the back of Shauna's head in the dark — the rigid set of her spine, the too-even breathing — and you think about the way she looked at you when you didn't raise your hand. The door that closed.

You think: I could say something. And then you think: it would make it worse.

So you don't.

You just slip back out through the entrance, as quiet as you can manage, and let the night close behind you.

------

The fire outside Nat's hut banked low, barely embers. You crouch down in front of the entrance flap and feel immediately ridiculous.

You scratch the frame anyway. Twice.

A pause. Then: "Yeah?"

"It's me."

Another pause, shorter. The flap pulls back and Nat's there, hair loose, eyes clear in the way that means she wasn't asleep either. She takes one look at your face — whatever your face is doing, whatever shape you've let it settle into now that no one important is watching — and her expression does something quiet and warm.

You don't really have words for what you need right now. You make a face that communicates most of it anyway: the particular pressed-together-lips, chin-down, ran-over-dog look that means I know this is a lot to ask and I'm not going to explain it properly but.

"Air's a little thick over there," you manage.

Nat looks at you for half a second. Then she pulls the flap open wider and steps aside.

"Yeah," she says simply. "Come on."

You're almost asleep when it arrives, the way small things do at the end of long days — sideways and quiet, slipping in through a gap you didn't know you'd left open.

You left the light on.

In your bedroom. At home. The lamp on the desk, the one with the pull-chain you always forgot to check before you went to bed, the one your dad had replaced the bulb in twice because you kept leaving it running overnight. You could see it so clearly it almost hurt — the specific warm orange of it through the curtains, the way it would still be on right now, back there, in that room, in that house, waiting without knowing it had anything to wait for.

You'd forgotten how dramatic it was—this single, strangled note that vibrated through the whole entryway of Tara's building, like the building itself was personally offended someone wanted in. You stood there with the envelope in your hand, watching the little intercom light flicker, and thought, with total sincerity, this could still not happen.

It happened.

"Yeah?" Sam's voice, tinny through the speaker.

"It's, uh." You cleared your throat. "It's me. Y/N."

A pause that felt longer than it probably was.

"Come up."

The door buzzed and clicked, and you pushed it open before you could think too hard about it, because thinking too hard about it was exactly how you'd ended up standing outside this building for eleven minutes already, rehearsing a speech you already knew you weren't going to give.

The envelope was getting soft at the corners from how tightly you were holding it.

By the time you reached Tara's floor, Sam was already in the doorway. Arms crossed. Not hostile, exactly—Sam Carpenter didn't really do hostile, not toward you, not anymore—but there was a particular stillness to her that made you feel like you were being assessed by airport security.

"Hey," you said.

"Hey." Sam's eyes flicked to the envelope in your hand, then back to your face. She didn't ask about it. "She's in her room."

"Right. Cool. Thanks." You shifted your weight. "Is she—"

"She's fine," Sam said, in a tone that suggested fine was doing a lot of structural work in that sentence. "Door's open."

You nodded and slid past her into the apartment, very aware of Sam's eyes on the back of your head the entire walk down the hallway. Dook watched you from the arm of the couch with the profound disinterest of a creature who had seen this exact scene play out before and found it tedious.

Tara's door was, in fact, open. A few inches. Enough that you could see a sliver of her room—the corner of her desk, a stack of books, one socked foot hanging off the edge of the bed.

You knocked anyway. Soft, with one knuckle.

"What," Tara said. Not unkindly. Just—flat. Tired in a way that made something in your chest twist.

"It's me."

A pause. Then the creak of the mattress, footsteps, and the door swung open the rest of the way. Tara stood there in an oversized hoodie—yours, you registered distantly, the one she'd stolen weeks ago and never given back—hair pulled up messily, looking like she'd spent the better part of two days in this room and had only recently remembered that other rooms existed.

She looked at you. Then at the envelope. Then back at you.

"Hi," she said, carefully.

"Hi."

Neither of you moved for a second.

"Can I—" You gestured vaguely past her, toward the room, toward anywhere that wasn't a doorway with Sam's presence radiating from somewhere down the hall like a low-grade weather system.

"Yeah." Tara stepped back, let you in, and closed the door most of the way—not all the way, because some habits ran deeper than current circumstances, but enough.

You stood in the middle of her room. The envelope felt enormous in your hand, like it had its own gravitational pull, like everyone in a three-block radius could probably see it.

"So," Tara said.

"So."

"You're here."

"I'm here." You looked around her room like it might offer you something useful—a script, an exit, anything. Dook's collar, hanging off her desk chair. The rabbit-shaped water stain on the wall. None of it helped. "I, um. I wanted to—okay, here's the thing."

Tara waited. She had her arms crossed loosely, not defensive exactly, more like she was bracing for something without knowing what shape it would take.

"I've been trying to figure out how to say some stuff," you said. "Like, actual stuff. Real stuff. And I had this whole—I had a plan, actually, I had a whole thing I was gonna say, and I practiced it, which is embarrassing to admit, I practiced an entire speech in my bathroom mirror like a lunatic—"

"Y/N."

"—and every single time I tried to actually say it, like, out loud, to a person, to you, specifically, my brain just—" You made a gesture with your free hand, something between an explosion and a shrug. "Short circuits. Just completely. Every time. So."

You held out the envelope.

Tara looked at it. Didn't take it immediately.

"What is it?"

"It's the speech," you said. "Sort of. It's—I wrote it down. Because apparently that's the only way I can actually get through it without my brain doing the thing where it just goes static." You pushed it toward her another inch. "It's not, like, a big dramatic thing. I just—I needed to say some stuff and I can't say it, so I wrote it, and I figured if I wrote it I could actually give it to you instead of, like, chickening out for the fortieth time."

Tara reached out, slowly, and took the envelope. Her fingers brushed yours for half a second—you both noticed it, you were sure of that, the way her gaze flickered down and then back up.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay." You exhaled. Looked at the door. Looked back at her. "I'm gonna go now."

"You're gonna—what?"

"I can't be here when you read it," you said, and the honesty of it surprised even you, the way it just fell out without your permission. "I tried to think about it and I just—I can't. I'll spiral. I'll watch your face do something and try to interpret it in real time and it'll be a disaster, so I'm gonna—" You gestured at the door again. "I'm gonna go. But—"

You stopped.

Tara was looking at you, envelope held loosely in both hands, an expression on her face you couldn't entirely read—somewhere between confusion and something gentler, something that made you want to leave even faster before it could fully resolve into whatever it was becoming.

"But what?" she said, quiet.

"Just—" You swallowed. "Read it whenever. No rush. And then, um." You looked at the floor, then back up, because you'd come this far. "Call me. When you're done. Okay?"

Tara's grip on the envelope tightened slightly. "Okay."

"Okay." You nodded, once, like that settled something, and turned toward the door before your nerve could finish dissolving entirely. You paused with your hand on the frame. Looked back at her.

"For what it's worth," you said, "I'm glad it's you."

You didn't wait to see what she did with that. You let yourself out, said a slightly too-fast goodbye to Sam on your way past—who gave you a look that you didn't have the bandwidth to decode—and were down the stairs and out onto the street before you let yourself breathe properly for the first time in twenty minutes.

Tara stood in the middle of her room holding the envelope like it might detonate.

For what it's worth, I'm glad it's you.

"Unbelievable," she said, to no one. To Dook, who had wandered in through the gap in the door and was now surveying the scene from the foot of her bed with mild curiosity. "Do you believe this? She just—she drops that, and then she leaves. Who does that?"

Dook didn't seem to have an opinion.

"That's so—" Tara dropped onto her bed, envelope still in hand, and glared at it like it had personally wronged her. "That is the most Y/N thing I have ever— she can't even— she writes a whole letter because she can't talk, and then she can't even be there when I read it, and then right as she's leaving she just casually drops 'I'm glad it's you' like that's a normal thing to say and then walks out the door—"

She flopped backward onto her pillows, holding the envelope above her face, scowling at it.

"You absolute coward," she told it. "You absolute, certified—"

She rolled her eyes. Scoffed, audibly, at the ceiling.

"'I'm glad it's you,'" she repeated, in a mocking imitation of your voice that wasn't actually very accurate but made her feel slightly better anyway. "Just gonna—just gonna say that. And leave. What am I supposed to do with that, Y/N? What am I supposed to—"

Dook climbed into her lap, apparently unmoved by the monologue, and began kneading at her stomach with single-minded focus.

Tara sighed. Looked at the envelope again.

It had her name on the front. Just Tara, in your handwriting—the same blocky, slightly-too-careful print you used for everything, the kind of handwriting that looked like it had been taught discipline at some point and never fully forgiven for it.

She turned it over. The flap wasn't sealed, just tucked.

"Okay," she said, mostly to herself. "Okay, fine. Let's see what the big mystery is."

She opened it.

Tara,

Okay so. I wrote and rewrote this like six times, so if it's weird in places that's why. Also I'm aware this may be a poor way to communicate with someone you're—whatever we are. I know. I'm aware. Bear with me.

I'm not going to explain everything. I think you know that, and I think you're not going to ask, which—thank you. But I also don't want to just... not say anything. Because that's what I usually do, and I think the not-saying-anything is part of what's been making this so weird. So here's some stuff. Not everything. But some stuff.

The medication thing. I've been on it for a while. Longer than you'd probably guess. And the part I never really talk about—the part I don't think I've ever said out loud to anyone, actually, not even Henry, not even my mom—is that sometimes I don't know which thoughts are mine.

Like. I'll feel something—anxious, or sad, or just this flat nothing—and I won't be able to tell if that's just me, like, my actual personality, the way I'd feel regardless, or if it's a side effect, or if it's the thing the medication is supposed to be treating poking through anyway, or if it's withdrawal from missing a dose, or if it's just a Tuesday. And there's no way to know. There's no test for "is this me." You just have to sit there and feel the thing and not know whose feeling it is.

It's been like that for a long time. Long enough that I stopped really noticing it as strange. It just became background noise—this low hum of "is this real, is this mine, would I feel this anyway." I got good at ignoring it. I got good at a lot of things by ignoring them, honestly.

I'm not telling you this so you feel bad, or so you treat me differently, or so you start, like, monitoring me or whatever. I really don't want that. I just—you know now. About the bottles. And I didn't want there to be this thing where you knew something and I knew you knew and we both just kept walking around it like it was furniture. That's worse. I've done that before, with other people, and it's worse.

So. That's some of it. Not all of it. But some.

Anyway. Call me when you're done reading this. I'll be around.

—Y/N

Tara read it twice.

The second time, she read it slower—not because the words were complicated, but because she found herself stopping at certain ones, going back, turning them over.

Is this mine.

Sometimes I don't know which thoughts are mine.

She set the letter down on her chest and stared at the ceiling for a long moment. Dook had given up on the kneading and curled into a loaf against her hip, purring in the low, steady way that meant he'd decided she wasn't going anywhere.

She thought about the cabinet. The bottles, slightly out of place, the names she'd recognized from Sam's medicine cabinet years ago. She thought about every time she'd seen you go quiet in a room full of people—not sad, exactly, just elsewhere, like part of you had stepped out and left the rest behind to keep up appearances. She thought about the nightmares Anika had mentioned once, off-hand, the bad weeks in winter that always seemed to track with something Tara had never quite been able to place.

She thought about you, sitting on a bathroom floor at some point, at some unknown hour, trying to figure out if the thing you were feeling belonged to you.

"Christ," Tara said quietly, to the ceiling, to Dook, to no one.

She picked the letter back up. Read the part about I'm not telling you this so you feel bad again, and felt bad anyway, in a different way than she suspected you'd been worried about—not pity, not the kind of bad that made people awkward and careful and distant. Just—an ache. A specific, located ache, for every version of you that had sat with that low hum of is this real and never told anyone, because telling people felt like handing them a weapon.

And then you'd handed it to her. In an envelope. While fleeing the scene.

Tara let out a short laugh, mostly at herself, mostly fond.

"God," she said. "Okay."

She sat up. Reached for her phone.

------

It rang twice before you picked up.

"Hey," you said. Your voice had a specific quality to it—too casual, the kind of careful-casual that meant you'd probably been staring at your phone for the last however-many minutes, willing it to either ring or not ring, you couldn't decide which.

"Hey," Tara said.

A pause. The kind of pause that, on any other day, with any other people, might have been awkward. It wasn't, exactly. It was just—full. Loaded with the specific weight of two people who'd just exchanged something neither of them had words for yet.

"So," you said.

"So." Tara picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. "Cool cool."

A small laugh, disbelieving. "'Cool cool'?"

"I said it once."

"It sounded like twice."

"It was one word, repeated for emphasis. That's different."

"That's not a real distinction, Tara."

"It's a very real distinction."

"Okay," you said, clearly grinning now, "noted. 'Cool cool' is your thing now. I'm gonna bring it up forever."

"You absolutely will not."

"I absolutely will. It's on record."

"There's no official record."

"There's an official record now."

Tara rolled her eyes, but the smile won out anyway, tugging at the corner of her mouth even though you couldn't see it. "Can we circle back to the fact that you handed me a letter and then left?"

"We can circle back to that, sure. Briefly. And then we can circle away from it again, ideally forever."

"Forever's a long time."

"I'm an optimist."

Tara huffed out something that was almost a laugh. "You're really not, though."

"No," you agreed. "But it sounded good."

The line went quiet for a beat—not heavy, just settling, the kind of pause that came after the hard part had already happened and both of you were figuring out how to stand in the space after it.

"Thank you," Tara said, finally. Simple. Quiet. "For telling me. I know that wasn't—I know it wasn't easy."

"Yeah, well." You exhaled. "It's done now. So."

"So," Tara echoed, and let it be enough.

"For the record," you added, after a second, your voice dropping slightly, losing some of its performative ease, "I meant it. The thing I said before I left."

"I know," Tara said. "I meant it too. For what that's worth."

"It's worth a lot, actually."

"Good."

Another pause, softer this time—both of you sitting in it, neither one rushing to fill it.

"So," Tara said again, eventually. "What are you doing tonight?"

"Currently? Lying on my floor, recovering from emotional exposure."

"You're on the floor?"

"It felt appropriate."

"Get off the floor."

"I'm comfortable."

"You're being dramatic."

"I contain multitudes." A pause, and you could hear the shift in your own voice—lighter, but not fully steady, like you were testing the ground before putting your full weight on it. "You wanna come over?"

"Yeah," Tara said, immediately. Then, like she needed to dial it back a half-step: "I mean—yeah. If that's okay."

"It's okay."

"Okay." Tara was already up, scanning her room for shoes, for her jacket. "I'll bring snacks."

"You don't have to—"

"I'm bringing snacks, it's not a debate."

"Fine. Bring snacks. I'll see what I can scrounge for a movie."

"Anything but documentaries"

"Noted. Anything but documentaries." A pause. "What about DEBS?"

"...DEBS?"

"We didn't get through much of it last time, 'cause we—" you stopped.

"Distracted," Tara finished, and you could hear the grin even through the phone.

"That's one word for it."

"It's the accurate word."

"Sure. Okay. DEBS, then. We'll see how far we get this time."

"Statistically," Tara said, "not far."

"Statistically," you agreed, "yeah."

Tara laughed—a real one, short and warm, and something in her chest loosened that had been tight for days. "Okay. I'm coming over. Give me, like, fifteen minutes."

"Take your time."

"See you soon."

"See you soon."

Tara hung up. Sat there for a second, phone still in her hand, looking at the dark screen, feeling lighter than she had in days—not lighter like the weight was gone, exactly, but lighter like she'd finally set part of it down somewhere she trusted to hold it.

The letter was still on her bed, folded back along its original creases. She picked it up, looked at it once more, and tucked it carefully into the drawer of her nightstand—the one she kept things in. Important things. Things that mattered.

Then she grabbed her jacket off the back of her chair and headed out into the apartment, already half-distracted, already thinking about snacks and Debs and the specific, familiar warmth of your couch.

Sam looked up from the kitchen counter as Tara passed, takeout containers from the night before still drying in the rack. "Going out?"

"Y/N's," Tara said, not stopping, already reaching for her keys by the door.

"Mm." Sam went back to her book, then added, without looking up, like it was the most casual thing in the world: "Text me if you're staying over."

Tara paused with her hand on the doorknob.

A week ago—a few days ago, even—that sentence would've landed differently. She would've heard something underneath it that wasn't there, gotten defensive about a thing nobody had accused her of, made it bigger and sharper than it needed to be because that was easier than just—being seen.

She didn't do any of that now.

"Yeah," Tara said. "I will."

Sam glanced up at that—just briefly, just enough to catch the difference, the absence of an edge that was usually there. She didn't comment on it. Just nodded, small and easy, and went back to her book.

"Tell her I said hi," Sam added, as Tara opened the door.

"Will do."

The door closed behind her, and Tara stood in the hallway for a second, keys in hand, feeling something settle into place that she didn't have a name for yet—except that it felt like the opposite of bracing. Like she wasn't holding her breath anymore.

Tara sat on the edge of your bed and held the to-go cup in both hands and tried very hard not to read into it. The cup was warm. You'd gotten it before you left, which meant you'd gotten up early, which meant you'd barely slept, which meant—

She read into it anyway.

Had to run out. Three words on a Post-it note, your blocky handwriting, no period at the end. Stuck to the lid of the cup like punctuation you hadn't committed to. She stared at it until the words stopped looking like words and started looking like a door closing at a very reasonable pace that she wasn't supposed to take personally.

She took it personally.

The coffee was good. Of course it was good—you'd gotten it from the place on the corner that she'd mentioned exactly once, in passing, three weeks ago, that she liked because they didn't burn the milk. Of course you'd remembered that. Of course you'd gotten it before you left instead of just leaving, because you were constitutionally incapable of not taking care of people even when you were in the middle of running away from them.

Tara drank it standing up. Gathered her things with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd done this before—sneakers, jacket, phone, the notes she'd scattered across the coffee table the night before. She checked the bathroom mirror, reassembled herself into something that looked like a person who'd slept fine, and let herself out.

The lock clicked behind her.

------

She stood in your hallway for a second longer than necessary.

Then she went home.

Sam was in the kitchen when Tara got back, sitting at the counter with both hands wrapped around her own coffee, reading something on her phone. She looked up when Tara came through the door and her expression did exactly nothing alarming.

That was suspicious.

"Hey," Tara said, dropping her bag by the door and kicking off her shoes with practiced imprecision.

"Hey." Sam turned her phone face-down. Reached for her coffee. "How was Tai's?"

The name landed carefully, like Sam had chosen it deliberately, like she'd been holding it in her mouth waiting for the right moment to set it down.

"Fine," Tara said. "Sorry for the last-minute thing. I should've texted."

"Mm." Sam sipped her coffee. Looked at Tara over the rim of her mug with the serene, infuriating patience of someone who already knew the shape of a conversation before it happened. "You've been staying over there a lot."

"I've been studying—"

"A lot," Sam repeated, with the exact same inflection.

Tara looked at her older sister. Sam looked back. The kitchen clock ticked between them.

"I don't have time for this," Tara said, and picked up her bag and walked down the hall to her room.

She heard Sam hum behind her. Not smug—just knowing. Which was somehow worse.

Her bed was exactly where she'd left it, which was a comfort, and it received her without complaint when she dropped face-first into the pillows. She lay there for a while, cataloguing the ceiling through closed eyelids, replaying the previous twelve hours with the particular masochism of someone who knew they shouldn't but couldn't stop.

I'm not running. That was what you'd said. Or—Tara had said it, actually. Which in retrospect was ironic, given the Post-it note.

She pressed her face harder into the pillow.

Okay. So that was the thing about you—the infuriating, specific, totally predictable thing—you did this. You let people close enough to see the edges of you, close enough to reach out and almost touch, and then something shifted in you and you got up before sunrise and got coffee from the right place and left a note that said you had to run out. Like that was a normal thing. Like you weren't the same person who'd stood by the window at 3 AM with your palm against the glass, listening.

I'm not going to run, Tara had said.

And you'd said I know. Three times. Like it was a very reasonable thing to believe.

She finally rolled over and stared at the actual ceiling, the familiar water stain in the corner that looked vaguely like a rabbit if she tilted her head.

She should change. She was still in yesterday's clothes and her jacket and she'd been in them since the gym bag drop-off and the couch and the morning, and she should change and shower and eat something and do all the things that regular people did on regular days.

She sat up.

Reached back to take out her earrings—gold hoops, small ones, her favorites—and found:

One.

Tara's hand dropped. She reached back again. Both hands this time, systematic, methodical.

One earring.

She went very still.

Then she thought, with perfect clarity, about the nightstand in your bedroom. About the moment, weeks ago now, when she'd caught her earring on your pillow and unclipped it, setting it on the nightstand without thinking. You'd found it then, placed it back for her. But this time—

This time she'd been half asleep, gathered her things in the thin grey morning light, left quickly and quietly and—

The other earring was in your bed.

Tara sat on the edge of her mattress with one hand pressed flat on her knee and thought about this for a long moment.

She could text you. That was the obvious solution. Simple, practical, completely straightforward: hey, think I left an earring in your room, no rush. Normal. Fine. The kind of text that wouldn't require her to think too hard about why sending it felt like crossing a room that had gotten very complicated overnight.

She looked at her phone.

Put it face-down on the bed.

Lay back down.

Great, she told the ceiling. Great, fantastic, this is all going great.

The day did not improve from there.

------

She tried to read. She got three paragraphs in before she realized she'd been looking at the same sentence for eleven minutes without it entering her brain. She tried to watch something and couldn't find anything that required the appropriate level of not-thinking. She made herself tea and then forgot to drink it until it was room temperature, which was its own special kind of failure.

She wandered into the living room. Dook watched her from the armchair with the disdainful patience of a cat who had observed many human spirals and found them tedious.

"Don't," Tara told him.

He blinked slowly. Looked away. Which was, objectively, worse.

She cleaned her bathroom. Reorganized her bookshelf by color, then by author, then decided she hated both systems and put the books back roughly where they'd been. She did a load of laundry. She called Mindy and then didn't say anything interesting enough to explain why she'd called, and Mindy, bless her, just talked for twenty minutes about a film she'd seen and didn't push.

She thought about the earring approximately every four minutes.

She thought about the note—had to run out—approximately every three.

Sam appeared in the doorway of Tara's room around seven with the expression of someone performing casual concern and not quite landing it.

"What do you want for dinner?"

Tara was horizontal on her bed, one arm over her face. "I don't care."

A beat. "Thai?"

"Sure."

"I was thinking Italian actually."

"Fine."

"Or we could do that ramen place."

"Sam. Whatever. Anything is fine."

Silence. Sam didn't leave. Tara felt the specific weight of her sister's attention, the gathering pressure of it, the way Sam could weaponize a quiet room just by standing in it.

"You always debate me on dinner," Sam said. "Even when you don't actually have a preference. You still debate me on principle."

"I'm tired."

"You're not tired."

Tara moved her arm off her face and looked at her sister. Sam was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, expression carefully gentle in the way that always meant she was ready to catch something.

"I lost my earring," Tara said.

Sam waited.

"The gold hoops." Tara sat up, because suddenly she couldn't do this horizontal. "The small ones. From mom."

"I know which ones."

"I lost one." She looked at her hands in her lap. "I left it. In—" She stopped. Started again. "In Y/N's room."

Sam said nothing.

"We're not—" Tara's jaw worked. "Things are weird right now. Between us. It's—it's awkward, kind of. But also not? That's the thing, it's like, it's awkward but we're still texting, we're still studying together, we're still—it's the same as it's always been except it's completely different but from the outside you'd never even know that anything—" She stopped herself. Pushed her hair back with both hands. "This is so complicated. And it doesn't even have to be. It doesn't have to be complicated. That's the stupid part."

Sam unfolded her arms. Moved from the doorway to the edge of Tara's bed, slowly, the way you'd approach something you didn't want to startle. She sat down.

"The earring's in her room," Tara said again, flatly. "Because I've been sleeping there. Not—" she shook her head, "—okay, yes, like that, but not just like that. It's not just—" She pressed her fingers to her mouth for a second. "She got me coffee this morning. From the right place. And left a note that said she had to run out. And I'm sitting here losing my mind over a Post-it note, Sam, which is insane—"

"It's not insane."

"It's insane. She leaves a note, I take it personally, there's an earring in her bed, we spent last night—" She exhaled. "We said things. Last night. Real things. And now she's gone and I don't know if she ran because she got scared or because she had an actual thing to do and I'm just—" The word dissolved somewhere in her throat. She looked at her sister. "I don't know how to do this with her."

Sam was quiet for a moment, in the specific Sam way that meant she was choosing her words instead of just her tone.

"You've never known how to do it with her," she said, finally. "Since Woodsboro."

Tara looked at her.

"I watched you two then," Sam said simply. "You used to pick fights just to have a reason to be in the same room."

"That's not—I didn't—" Tara's protest lost momentum partway through. "She was infuriating."

"She still is. And you're still here." Sam reached over and smoothed a piece of Tara's hair back—a small gesture, the kind she'd made since Tara was seven and inconsolable about things she couldn't name. "What happened last night?"

Tara was quiet for a long moment.

"She's scared," she said. "Of—of being known, I think. Of letting someone—" She shook her head. "She acts like letting someone in means handing them something they can use against her. And last night I told her that I wasn't going to run and she said I know and she looked at me like—"

She stopped.

Like it was the most terrifying thing anyone had ever said to her. That's what she'd been trying to find words for since 3 AM and hadn't, quite.

"She believes you," Sam said.

"I know she does."

"That's what scares her."

Tara stared at the middle distance for a moment. Outside, the city was doing its evening thing—horns, voices, the particular ambient murmur that had started to feel like home in a way that surprised her sometimes.

"I want my earring back," she said.

"I know."

"And I want—" She stopped. Laughed, small and a little helpless. "I want it to not be so hard. That's the thing. It's hard in a way where I can see exactly why it's hard, I can see every step of the logic, and it still—" She gestured vaguely at the whole situation.

Sam nodded, slow and understanding. "Thai?" she offered, after a moment.

Tara looked at her. "You said Italian."

"I was testing you." A corner of Sam's mouth turned up. "There she is."

Tara wanted to roll her eyes and managed only a tired, involuntary smile. "Italian," she said. "But the good place. Not the one with the weird cheese situation."

"The weird cheese situation was one time."

"It was three times, Sam."

"It was—" Sam paused. "Okay. It was two and a half times. The third one is contested."

"It's not contested."

"Extremely contested."

Tara leaned sideways and put her head on her sister's shoulder. Sam adjusted, settled, let her.

"It's going to be okay," Sam said. Not as a prediction, exactly. More like a thing she was choosing to believe out loud.

Tara looked at the rabbit-shaped water stain on the wall across from her bed.

"Yeah," she said.

You threw a right cross into the bag, felt the impact travel up through your wrapped knuckles, your wrist, the meat of your shoulder.

Again.

Left hook. The ache in your side flared—that persistent, low-grade complaint from the scar tissue that never quite healed right. You'd learned to work around it the way you'd learned to work around most things. Quietly. Without making it anyone else's problem.

Again.

Punching a bag required enough of your attention to crowd out coherent thought while still leaving just enough room for the stuff you were trying not to think about to seep in around the edges. Which was probably counterproductive. Henry had told you that approximately forty-seven times.

You threw a combination—right, right, left, right—and let yourself think about it anyway because you were clearly a masochist.

Tara knew.

The bottles had been moved. Fractionally, barely, the kind of shift that only mattered if you were the person who organized them by half-centimeter intervals because catastrophic anxiety expressed itself in deeply annoying ways. She'd been in your bathroom at 3 AM looking for painkillers, and she'd found—

You hit the bag harder.

She hadn't said anything. You hadn't said anything. And so the last several days had been this strange, performance of normalcy that you suspected was fooling absolutely no one. Texts that were slightly too brief. Study sessions where you both stared at your respective notes with the focused intensity of people actively not looking at each other. Laughter that came half a beat too late, like you were both reading from a script with a slight delay.

To an outside observer, nothing would look different. That was the thing about being good at keeping things close—you could perform fine so convincingly that even the person watching you couldn't prove you weren't.

But Tara watched you like she was looking for something. And you watched her watching you, and neither of you said a word about any of it.

The migraine had started around noon, threading itself behind your left eye with the patient, territorial quality of something settling in for a long stay. It had been quiet for a month. One whole month, which was the longest stretch you'd had in almost three years, and you'd been stupid enough to let yourself think maybe that was it. Maybe things were turning a corner.

Things were not turning a corner.

Your left side screamed in protest as you threw another hook, and you dropped your arms, breathing hard, pressing your wrapped hand flat against your ribs. Just held it there. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed in their particular frequency—just barely audible, just barely maddening.

Tara had been the one genuinely good thing.

You turned that thought over, examined it from all the angles, and hated how straightforwardly true it was. Not an easy thing, not an uncomplicated thing. But good. Consistently good. Good in the way where you'd stopped bracing for the catch, stopped waiting for the part where it went sideways, started just—

And now you were here. Performing the relationship-that-wasn't in front of people who cared about you, while a secret sat between you and Tara like a third person in every room, taking up all the air.

Sand sifted from a small tear in the base of the bag, pooling quietly on the mat.

You stared at it.

Then you pulled off your right wrap slowly, then the left, wincing when the pressure released from your sore knuckles. Stuffed both into your bag. Checked your phone with the specific dread of someone who already knows they've been ignoring it too long.

Three messages from Anika, timestamped over the last two hours:

nik: dinner?

nik: ok not hungry just checking in

nik: u coming home tonight or..?

One from Henry, which was just a link to a video about penguins that he'd sent with absolutely no context, as was his custom.

One from the bank, subject line containing the word reminder, which you didn't open because whatever it was, it could continue reminding you from the unread pile for a little while longer.

You closed the app. Changed out of your gym clothes in the locker room, moving slowly, because the migraine had settled in behind both eyes now and the fluorescent lights were being genuinely hostile. Pulled on your jacket and stepped out into the cold.

She was sitting on the bench outside the building's side exit, the one near the loading dock that most people didn't use, eating lo mein directly from a takeout container with a pair of plastic chopsticks. Like that was simply a thing one did at nine o'clock on a Thursday.

Olivia looked up. Took you in with that unhurried, comprehensive way she had—reading you the way she used to, the way that had driven you crazy when you were seventeen and was still not entirely comfortable at nineteen.

She didn't say you look terrible, which was either politeness or tactical patience.

"I've got another container," she said instead, patting the bag beside her on the bench.

You stood there for a second, gym bag over your shoulder, migraine doing its thing, all the things you weren't thinking about cycling through you at low volume. The sensible thing to do was to say thanks, no, I'm heading home.

You sat down.

She handed you the second container—fried rice, which she remembered was what you always ordered—and a pair of chopsticks still in their paper sleeve. You took them without comment. Cracked them apart. Ate.

The city moved around you. A cab rolled by on the cross street, someone laughed too loudly from a window somewhere above, the exhaust from a delivery truck cut briefly through the cold before dispersing. Normal city sounds. Uncomplicated.

"You don't have to tell me," Olivia said, after a while. Not are you okay, which you would have deflected. Not what happened, which you would have deflected. Just that. Leaving the door open and not standing in the doorway.

"I'm not going to," you said.

"I know."

You ate more fried rice. It was good—from the place on Amsterdam that you'd told her about once, back when both of you had meant something specific and present tense. You thought about asking if she'd gone there on purpose, but decided the answer didn't matter.

"Don't worry about it," you said, finally.

Olivia made the face. You'd forgotten about the face. It was this specific expression she got when she was choosing her battles, where the defeat showed at the corners of her eyes before she'd smoothed it away—resigned, not hurt. Familiar in the way that only things from a long time ago could be familiar, worn smooth by repetition.

"Okay," she said.

You stayed anyway. Not talking about it—not talking about much of anything, really. She told you about the documentary, about a location scout that had gone impressively sideways, about a cinematographer she was working with who apparently had opinions about everything and the confidence to match. You listened, and ate your fried rice, and let yourself exist in someone else's story for a while without having to contribute your own.

It was almost generous, in its way. Being allowed to just sit.

When you finally checked your phone it was quarter past midnight, which wasn't possible but was apparently happening. You said goodbye. Walked home the long way, because the cold was doing something useful against the migraine and the long way bought you more of it.

You didn't think about much. That, at least, was a small victory.

Your apartment was dark.

Or—mostly dark. The lamp in the living room was on, which you noticed through the gap at the bottom of your front door before you'd even unlocked it. Anika's light was off. You could see that from the sliver between her door and the frame. She was already asleep, which made sense because it was—

You checked your phone.

3:06 AM.

You stood in the hallway for a second, doing the math on that and finding it came up short. You'd left Olivia at the bench around midnight. You'd come home via the long way, which added twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five. That didn't account for three hours.

You sort of wondered within that time. Vaguely. Unsettlingly.

You unlocked the door and pushed it open.

Tara was asleep on your couch.

She'd clearly meant to wait up—there were notes spread across the coffee table in her handwriting, like she'd been reviewing something, and the TV was on mute, images still moving silently across the screen. But somewhere between arriving and now, she'd tipped sideways into the couch cushions, one arm tucked under her cheek, hair falling across her face in a dark curtain. Your Spider-Man throw pillow was wedged under her elbow.

You stood in the doorway and watched her sleep for exactly as long as it took you to become aware you were doing it, at which point you closed the door behind you—quietly, because you were a person with basic decency—and went to take off your shoes.

The lamp clicked off.

"You came home."

Your hand stilled on your shoelace. You looked over. Tara was sitting up, blinking slowly, hair thoroughly destroyed. The notes on the coffee table crinkled as she shifted her knee against them.

"In general?" you said. "Usually, yeah."

She wasn't laughing. She was doing the thing where she pressed her lips together and looked at you and the expression was so carefully arranged into not worried that it was essentially a billboard that said I'm worried.

"Why are you in my apartment?" you asked, genuinely curious.

She sidestepped it. Tara Carpenter, master of the redirect. "Where were you?"

"Out."

"It's three in the morning."

"Noted." You got your other shoe off, set them both by the door with more precision than strictly necessary. "You want some water? I'm getting water."

"Y/N—"

"I'll get you water anyway." You went to the kitchen, mostly because you needed a moment inside a different room. Filled two glasses. Came back. Set one on the coffee table in front of her and held yours.

Tara looked at the glass. Then at you. "Three in the morning," she said again, like the repetition would do something different.

"I know what time it is."

"I've been here since nine."

"You didn't have to be here at all."

"I know." Her voice came down slightly, losing the edge it had been building. "I know I didn't have to. I was just—I thought I'd stop by and then Anika said you were at the gym and I figured I'd just wait, and then—" She stopped. Pressed her fingers against her eyes briefly. "You were gone for six hours, Y/N."

You looked at her for a second, some dry, distant part of your brain cataloguing the specific quality of her frustration—how it sat differently than anger, how it had something else underneath it that it was very determinedly not showing.

"Relax," you said. "It's not that late."

"It's three AM."

"I've been out later."

"That doesn't—" She made a short, sharp gesture with her hand. "That's not the point."

"Then what is the point?" Your voice came out even, which was a miracle of engineering given the migraine and the sand on the gym mat and the bottles that had been moved two inches to the left. "I'm fine. I'm home. I'm getting water."

"You're deflecting."

"I'm hydrating."

"Y/N." Just your name, flat and tired and honest. Something in her jaw had gone soft, the tight line of it releasing slightly. "Come on."

You looked at her. At the notes scattered on your coffee table, your Spider-Man pillow wedged under her elbow, the muted television still playing something with a lot of dramatic camera movement. She'd been here for six hours waiting for you to come home. She'd fallen asleep doing it.

You laughed, a dry little exhale through your nose.

"What's your damage, Tara?"

She blinked. "What?"

"What is this?" You gestured between the couch and the door and the general theatrical atmosphere of the room. "You break into my apartment—"

"Anika let me in—"

"—and sit vigil in my living room, and now you're running the Spanish Inquisition at three in the morning." You tilted your head. "It's not like we're married."

Something moved through her expression.

"Unless," you continued, because the dry, awful part of your brain was apparently going to finish this thought regardless, "you think I'm a flight risk. Is that it? You think if I'm out past midnight I've—what, skipped town?"

"Stop."

"Bought a one-way ticket? Changed my name? Started a new life in—"

"Stop." The second one had a different weight. Tara's voice had gone quiet in a way that cut through the rest of it, through the migraine and the sardonic running commentary and all the careful armor you'd been wearing since the cabinet door clicked shut four days ago.

She was looking at you with an expression you didn't have a name for yet.

"You know that I know," she said.

The room went very quiet.

Not you know I have concerns or you seem stressed lately or any of the oblique approaches you'd been expecting, bracing for, preparing your non-answers against. Just that. Straight through the middle of everything, clean and irrevocable.

You know that I know.

You set your glass of water down on the table with a careful, deliberate click.

"Yeah," you said.

Tara exhaled. Not relief, exactly. More like the controlled release of something she'd been holding at pressure for four days. "Okay. So we're past pretending."

"Were we pretending?"

"We were both pretending."

You turned away from her, moving toward the window, because the room felt too small and she was looking at you too directly and the soft way her voice had gone when you confirmed it was doing something to your chest that you hadn't budgeted for tonight. You pressed your knuckles briefly against the cool glass. Outside, the city was doing its three-in-the-morning thing—quieter, but not quiet. Never actually quiet.

"It's not a big deal," you said.

"I didn't say it was."

"You're looking at me like it is."

"I'm looking at you like I was worried about you," she said. "Those aren't the same thing."

"Tara—"

"I'm not going to ask you to explain it." Her voice stayed level, like she'd rehearsed this, like she'd had six hours on your couch to figure out exactly how to say it without spooking you. "I'm not asking anything. I just—I need you to know that I saw them, and I'm not—" She stopped. Started again. "I'm not different."

"I know you're not different."

"You've been weird."

"You've been weird."

"I've been weird because you've been weird!"

"And that's—" You turned around, because this was somehow turning into an argument and you were genuinely almost impressed by it. "That's what you want to lead with? Great. Really constructive."

"I'm not trying to be constructive, I'm trying to—" She pressed her fingers to her mouth for a second, jaw tightening. "You shut down. You're doing it right now. The thing where you make it funny so it doesn't have to be real."

"I make things funny because—"

"Because it's safer. Yeah. I know." She met your eyes across the room, and there was something in hers—patient, stubborn, not going anywhere—that made your ribs feel too close together. "I know, Y/N."

"You don't—"

"I've been watching you do it since high school." She stood up from the couch, her voice quiet but not gentle in the performative way, just genuinely quiet. Like she was telling you something she'd thought about for a long time. "Every time something real got close you made a joke. Or started a fight. Or disappeared." A beat. "Or punched someone."

"That was one time."

"It was multiple times."

"The first punch was warranted—"

"I'm not talking about the punches," she said, and the patience in her voice made you want to say something sharp and deflecting and mean because that would at least be a thing you knew how to do. "I'm talking about the part where you're scared and you think you have to handle it alone, and I'm—" She stopped. Looked down at the coffee table for a moment, at the scattered notes, then back at you. "I'm right here."

"I know you're right here."

"Then talk to me."

"I am talking to you."

"No you're not."

"I'm standing right here talking directly at your face—"

"You're arguing with me," she said. "That's different."

"Nominally—"

"Y/N." She crossed the room in a handful of steps and stopped just in front of you, close enough that she had to tilt her head back slightly to look at you properly. Her eyes were dark and serious and didn't look the least bit afraid of you, which was honestly annoying. "I'm not going to run. Whatever it is. I'm not."

"You don't know what it is."

"I know some of it. I know enough." She held your gaze, and something cracked slightly in the careful construction of her expression—something uncertain and genuine showing through. "I know Sam's medications. I know what they're for. And I know what it means that you—" She stopped herself. Chose a different route. "I know you've been carrying something for a long time. I knew that before I opened the cabinet. You didn't exactly hide it."

"I did, actually. Quite successfully."

"Not from me."

The thing was, she wasn't wrong. The thing was, Tara Carpenter had been watching you with those stupid observant eyes for the better part of six years, across two states and approximately forty percent of your respective disasters, and the idea that she hadn't noticed anything was—

It was stupid. It was a stupid thing to have convinced yourself of.

"You should've just asked," you said, and your voice came out roughly, in a way you hadn't planned.

"Would you have answered?"

The silence answered for you.

Tara's expression did something complicated and tired. "Yeah. That's what I thought." She didn't sound triumphant about it. She just sounded like someone who was very familiar with the specific shape of your walls and had stopped expecting them to not be there.

"I'm not—" You stopped. Pressed your palm flat against the window frame, cold glass against the heel of your hand. "I'm not great at this."

"I know."

"I mean I'm genuinely bad at it. Clinically."

"I know that too." A pause. "I've got my own stuff. You know that."

"That's different."

"It's not, actually."

"Sam has—"

"I'm not talking about Sam." Her voice was quiet and firm. "I'm talking about me. About what I still carry from Woodsboro and why sometimes I drink too much at parties and why I sleep with the light on and why I kept you at arm's length for years because getting close to people felt like a liability." She looked at you steadily. "So don't tell me it's different."

You looked back at her.

Outside, somewhere below, a car alarm started and then stopped. The muted television cycled through its dramatic camera movements. The migraine had settled into a low, consistent throb behind your left eye, patient as weather.

"I should sleep," you said.

"Yeah," Tara said. "You should."

She didn't move toward the door. You didn't move toward the bedroom. The few feet of space between you sat there, holding all the things neither of you were saying, which was at this point quite a lot.

"I'm not running," she said again, softer. Like she just needed to say it one more time. Like she needed you to have heard it twice.

The worst part—the part that was going to take a while to deal with—was that she meant it. You could tell she meant it, in the specific, irritating way you'd always been able to read Tara Carpenter even when she was actively trying to be unreadable. And the thing about someone meaning it was that it left you nowhere to go.

No punchline. No exit. No window to climb out of.

"Tara—"

"You don't have to say anything tonight," she said. "I'm not asking you to. I'm just—I needed to tell you that. That's all."

You looked at her for a long moment.

"You can take my bed," you said finally. "I'll crash out here."

She opened her mouth.

"Don't argue with me about it."

"I can—"

"Take the bed, Carpenter."

She closed her mouth. Looked at you. The stubborn set of her jaw was doing battle with something else—relief, maybe, or just exhaustion, or the accumulated weight of six days of pretending everything was fine when it wasn't.

"We're revisiting this," she said.

"I know."

"We're going to talk about it."

"I know."

"Like, actually talk. Not—" she gestured at the general space between you, "—this."

"I know," you said, for the third time. And then, before she could say anything else—before the conversation could turn into another corner you'd have to fight your way out of—you handed her the spare blanket folded over the chair arm and pointed toward your bedroom door. "Go. Sleep."

She took the blanket. Stood there another second, holding it, watching you with that look you still didn't have a name for.

"Goodnight," she said.

"Goodnight."

She went. The door didn't close all the way—left a sliver of light falling into the hall, the way you always left it. You stood by the window for a while after, watching the city's 3 AM version of itself, your palm still flat against the glass.

You knew she was right.

She blinked slowly, trying to orient herself. Papers were scattered across the coffee table in front of her—notes on the Cold War, timelines of the Cuban Missile Crisis, your chicken-scratch handwriting mixed with her annotations. Right. You'd both been studying at your place, sprawled across the couch with textbooks and highlighters, debating whether Khrushchev or Kennedy had been more responsible for the escalation.

A glance to her left revealed you passed out in the corner of the couch, head tilted back at what looked like an equally uncomfortable angle, one arm draped across your stomach. Your laptop was still balanced precariously on the armrest, screen dark.

Tara's phone said 2:47 AM in harsh blue light that made her headache intensify. Great.

This is what she got for forgetting her blue light glasses. She'd been staring at her laptop for hours, and now her brain was staging a revolt.

She needed painkillers.

Moving carefully so as not to wake you, Tara extracted herself from the couch. You didn't even stir, just made a soft sound and shifted slightly. She paused, watching the rise and fall of your chest for a moment before shaking herself. Painkillers. Focus.

The bathroom was down the hall, and she'd been here enough times to navigate in the dark. The cabinet above the sink was easy to find, and when she opened it, she found it neatly divided—the top shelf marked with a label maker tag that read "ANIKA" in blocky letters, the bottom shelf labeled "Y/N" in the same font.

Very organized. Very you.

Tara didn't linger on the observation, immediately scanning the shelves for anything that looked like Tylenol or Advil. Your shelf had the basics—a bottle of ibuprofen, some allergy medication, a few other over-the-counter things.

She reached for the ibuprofen, her fingers grazing it, when her hand accidentally knocked against another bottle. It tipped, nearly falling, and she caught it reflexively.

The label faced her.

Risperidone. 2mg. Take one tablet daily as prescribed.

Tara froze.

She knew that name. She'd seen it before, written on the bottles in Sam's medicine cabinet. The medication Sam took to help with her hallucinations, to keep her grounded when the past threatened to blur with the present.

Her eyes dropped to the other bottles on your shelf—some familiar, some not. Sertraline. Clonazepam. Names she recognized from Sam's careful explanations of what each one did, why she needed them.

The ibuprofen was forgotten in her other hand.

For a long moment, Tara just stood there, the bottle of risperidone held carefully like it might shatter. Her mind was racing—questions piling up so fast she couldn't sort through them. Why did you have these? How long had you been taking them? Did anyone else know?

The image of you passed out on the couch flashed through her mind—exhausted, vulnerable, completely unaware that she was standing in your bathroom holding pieces of something you'd never shared.

She carefully, deliberately, set the bottle back on the shelf. Not quite where it had been—her hands were shaking slightly—but close enough.

Then she closed the cabinet door with a quiet click, the painkillers completely forgotten.

"Tara?"

Your voice drifted from the living room, rough with sleep and confusion.

Tara's hand was still on the cabinet door. She took a breath, forcing her expression into something neutral before calling back, "Yeah, just—give me a minute. Using the bathroom."

It wasn't technically a lie. She was in the bathroom. Just not using it for its intended purpose.

She turned on the faucet, letting the water run while she tried to sort through the chaos in her head. She couldn't mention this. Couldn't just walk out there and ask why you had medication for hallucinations and anxiety and whatever else was in that cabinet.

You'd never offered that information. And going through your medicine cabinet—even accidentally, even with innocent intentions—felt like a violation of something.

Besides, you always got that stuff yourself. She'd noticed it before, how you were particular about your bathroom, about your space. How you deflected when Anika offered to grab something for you, always saying you'd get it.

Now she understood why.

Tara washed her hands, dried them, and took another steadying breath before opening the door.

You were sitting up now, rubbing your eyes, looking adorably disheveled and confused. "You okay?" you asked, voice still scratchy.

"Yeah, fine." The lie came easily, even as a million questions ricocheted through her mind. "Just woke up with a headache. Fell asleep weird."

"We both did." You stretched, wincing at what was probably a protesting muscle. "What time is it?"

"Almost three."

"Shit." You looked at the papers scattered everywhere, the evidence of your study session. "We really passed out hard."

"Cold War politics will do that to you."

You smiled, soft and sleepy, and Tara felt something twist in her chest. You looked so normal. So much like yourself. And yet there was this whole other layer she hadn't known about, hadn't even suspected.

"You should take my bed," you said, standing and trying to gather some of the papers. "I'll just crash here."

Tara raised an eyebrow. "You don't have to be weird about sharing a bed when you've literally seen me naked."

You stuttered slightly, papers nearly slipping from your hands. "I—that's—I'm gonna knock out again anyway. Staying on the couch."

There was something in your voice, just a hint of deflection that Tara might not have noticed before. But now, with the knowledge of that cabinet sitting heavy in her mind, she heard it clearly.

You were keeping distance. Maintaining boundaries she hadn't realized you needed.

"Okay," she said instead of pushing. "Goodnight, dork."

You mumbled something that might have been goodnight back, already settling back into your corner of the couch.

Tara headed to your room, closing the door softly behind her. She sat on the edge of your bed for a long moment, staring at nothing, trying to reconcile what she knew with what she'd just discovered.

Sam took risperidone because she'd been through trauma. Because Ghostface had left scars that went deeper than skin. Because sometimes she saw things that weren't there, heard her father's voice, felt the past creeping into the present.

And you took it too.

The implications sat heavy in Tara's chest as she finally laid down, pulling your blanket around her. Your pillow smelled like your shampoo, and she pressed her face into it, trying to quiet her mind.

When she glanced back through the cracked door, you were already passed out again, one arm flung over your eyes, completely still.

She didn't sleep much after that.

------

When you woke up, neck protesting the couch's lack of support, the apartment was quiet in that specific way that meant you were alone.

You sat up slowly, rubbing your face, and noticed immediately that Tara's shoes were gone from where she'd kicked them off by the door. Her jacket wasn't on the chair.

Your phone said 7:23 AM. Early enough that she might've had a class, or maybe she'd just wanted to get back to her own place.

That's when you noticed the post-it note stuck to your shoulder.

NERD.

Just that, in Tara's handwriting, with a little doodle of what might have been a middle finger or possibly just a very abstract flower. Hard to tell.

You smiled despite yourself, pulling the note off and setting it on the coffee table.

No text. Just the note.

That was fine. Normal, even. You'd see her later anyway.

You stood, stretching, and headed to the bathroom to brush your teeth and attempt to look like a functional human being. When you opened the medicine cabinet to grab your toothbrush, you froze.

The bottles on your shelf were slightly off. Not by much—most people wouldn't notice. But you noticed. You always noticed.

The risperidone was two inches to the left of where you kept it. The sertraline was at a slight angle. The clonazepam had been moved forward.

Someone had touched them.

Your heart rate picked up immediately, that familiar spike of anxiety that the medication was supposed to help manage. You grabbed the bottles, checking them quickly—nothing missing, caps all secure, everything accounted for.

But they'd been moved.

"Fuck," you muttered, setting them back in their proper places with shaking hands.

Anika wouldn't have touched your stuff. She knew better, knew you were particular about this, had never questioned why you kept that shelf so organized, so separate.

Which meant—

Tara.

She'd said she woke up with a headache. She'd been in the bathroom for more than a minute. She'd called back that she needed a moment.

"Fuck," you repeated, louder this time.

She'd seen them. She had to have. There was no other explanation for why they'd been moved, why the risperidone specifically was out of place.

You closed the cabinet harder than necessary, bracing your hands on the sink and staring at your reflection.

This was bad. This was really bad.

Tara hadn't mentioned anything. Hadn't asked. Which meant either she hadn't noticed—unlikely, given how observant she was—or she had noticed and was choosing not to say anything.

You weren't sure which option was worse.

You didn't text her.

What would you even say? Hey, did you go through my medicine cabinet and discover I'm on antipsychotics? Cool, cool, just checking.

So you went to class, went through the motions, tried to focus on anything other than the growing knot of anxiety in your stomach.

You were walking across campus, heading toward the library, when you saw her.

Tara was sitting on one of the benches near the quad, laptop balanced on her knees, completely absorbed in whatever she was working on. Her hair was half-up, and she was wearing your flannel over her hoodie—the one she'd stolen weeks ago and refused to give back.

For a moment, you just watched her. The afternoon sunlight caught her profile, that familiar little crinkle between her eyebrows that meant she was deep in thought. Her posture was slightly tense, shoulders up, one hand unconsciously playing with the drawstring of her hoodie.

You could walk away. Pretend you hadn't seen her, deal with this later or never.

But your feet carried you forward anyway.

"Hey."

She looked up, and something flickered across her face—surprise, maybe, or uncertainty. "Hey."

You gestured to the bench. "Can I sit?"

"I won't stop you." But she shifted her laptop, making room.

You sat, leaving a careful distance between you. Close enough to talk, far enough to maintain the careful pretense you'd both been performing for weeks.

For a moment, neither of you said anything. Just sat there, watching people cross the quad, the normal chaos of campus life moving around you.

"I didn't hear you leave," you said finally, keeping your voice soft. Not accusing. Just stating a fact.

Tara's fingers stilled on her laptop. "You were passed out. Didn't want to wake you."

"Could've texted."

"Could have," she agreed, but didn't offer an explanation for why she hadn't.

The silence stretched again, heavier this time.

You wanted to ask. Wanted to know if she'd seen, if she'd put the pieces together, if she was waiting for you to explain. But the words stuck in your throat, trapped behind years of carefully constructed walls.

"I should get to class," Tara said, starting to pack up her laptop.

"Yeah. Okay."

She stood, slinging her bag over her shoulder, and for a second you thought she might just walk away. Leave it unsaid, unacknowledged.

But she paused, looking down at you with an expression you couldn't quite read. "See you Thursday?"

"Yeah. Thursday."

She nodded, then turned and walked away, your flannel billowing slightly in the breeze.

You watched her go, that knot in your stomach tightening.

When you got back to your apartment later, you went straight to the bathroom. Checked the cabinet again, even though you'd already checked it three times that day.

The bottles were exactly where you'd left them this morning. Perfectly aligned, properly organized.

But you could still see them as they'd been when you first opened the cabinet—shifted, touched, evidence of Tara's presence.

"Fuck," you breathed, closing your eyes and leaning against the sink.

She knew. She had to know.

And you had no idea what to do about it.

Your phone buzzed. For a wild second, you thought it might be Tara, finally bringing it up, finally asking the questions you could see building behind her eyes.

But it was just Anika, asking if you wanted takeout for dinner.

You typed back a thumbs up, then stared at your phone for a long moment.

No messages from Tara. Just like this morning. Just like all day.

The silence felt louder than any conversation could have been.

And somewhere in the back of your mind, a small voice whispered what you'd been trying not to think: She saw, and now everything's different.

You closed the medicine cabinet, the click of the door echoing in the small bathroom.

Different.

The word sat heavy in your chest as you walked back to your room, trying to convince yourself that different didn't have to mean broken.

But the bottles had been moved.

You're sharpening your knife when they gather, the telltale body language of a group decision already made without you. Shauna stands at the center, arms crossed, that set to her jaw that means she's dug in. Nat's got her rifle. Tai's doing that thing where she looks simultaneously exhausted and ready for violence. Even Mari's there, knee clearly still bothering her but her face determined.

"We're going to check out the cave," Shauna announces, not quite looking at you. "Mari's going to show us where Coach's been hiding."

You stand, knife still in hand. "Okay. Give me two minutes to grab my—"

"You're staying here."

The words land with the finality of a judge's gavel. You blink, certain you've misheard. "What?"

"Someone needs to stay at camp." Shauna's tone is matter-of-fact, like she's discussing the weather and not benching you like some kind of liability. "Keep an eye on things."

"Keep an eye on—are you fucking serious right now?" Heat rises in your chest, the familiar surge of anger that comes when someone tries to protect you from yourself. "I can walk. I can—"

"It's a long hike," Nat cuts in, her voice gentler than Shauna's but no less firm. Her eyes drop pointedly to your leg—the one that's healed but still gives you trouble on rough terrain, still requires the cane you've been stubbornly refusing to use lately.

Your jaw clenches hard enough to hurt. "I'm fine."

"You collapsed last week carrying water," Tai says, and god, you hate that they all remember that, that your weakness is catalogued and discussed. "This isn't about you being tough enough. It's about being smart."

"Smart would be having another person who can actually fight if shit goes sideways," you argue, but even you can hear how the words ring hollow. Your leg's been aching since this morning, that deep throb that means you've been pushing too hard. Again.

Shauna finally meets your eyes, and there's something in her expression—not pity, worse than pity. Concern. The kind that makes you feel like fragile glass instead of a person.

"Just stay," she says, softer now. "Please."

The please is what kills you. Shauna doesn't say please. Shauna gives orders, makes demands, argues until everyone's too exhausted to disagree. Please means she actually cares, and caring makes this so much worse.

"Fine." The word tastes like battery acid. "Whatever."

You turn on your heel, or try to—your bad leg protests the dramatic exit, sending a spike of pain up your thigh that you absolutely refuse to acknowledge. You don't storm off so much as exit with aggressive purpose, jaw tight enough to crack teeth.

Behind you, you hear the murmur of voices making plans, organizing, doing all the things you should be part of but aren't because your body betrayed you and everyone knows it.

You make it three steps before you stop, something pulling you back despite the anger still simmering under your skin. When you turn, Shauna's watching you with an expression that's hard to read—worry, maybe guilt, definitely something complicated.

Your eyes meet hers, and for just a second, the anger drains away. All that's left is the fear, the vulnerability you'd rather chew glass than admit to.

Be safe. Please.

You don't say it out loud. Can't say it out loud without your voice cracking or your throat closing or some other humiliating display of emotion. But you let it show on your face, just for a heartbeat. Let her see that beneath the anger and the wounded pride, you're terrified. Because people who go into caves in these woods have a habit of not coming back, and if something happened to her—

Shauna's expression softens, just slightly. A tiny nod. She understands.

Then the moment breaks. She turns away, already moving into leadership mode, directing the others. And you're left standing there like an idiot, watching them prepare for something you should be part of.

They leave twenty minutes later. You don't watch them go.

An hour passes. Then two.

You try to keep busy—organizing supplies that don't need organizing, checking snares that were checked this morning, making a list of repairs that can wait another day. Anything to keep your hands moving, your mind occupied.

It doesn't work.

Your thoughts spiral like water down a drain, circling back to the same fears over and over. What if Coach Scott isn't alone? What if he has weapons? What if the cave collapses? What if, what if, what if—

You find yourself by Jackie's grave without consciously deciding to go there. The marker you'd made is still standing, weathered but solid. Someone's left fresh wildflowers—probably Shauna, though she'd deny it if asked.

"This is stupid," you tell the grave, your voice rough. "I should be there. I should be—"

But Jackie's not going to answer. Jackie's dead, has been dead, will always be dead. The only voice in your head is your own, and it's not particularly helpful right now.

Your mind drifts, unbidden, to that last conversation. Not with Jackie—you've replayed that one enough times to wear grooves in your memory. No, this is earlier. Before the crash. Before everything went to shit.

"You worry too much," Jackie had said, sprawled across your bed in that careless way she had, like the world was made to accommodate her comfort. "Shauna can take care of herself."

"I know that," you'd replied, but your hands had been fidgeting with the edge of your shirt, a tell Jackie knew all too well.

"Do you?" She'd rolled over to look at you, propping her chin on her hands. "Because sometimes I think you forget she's not actually made of porcelain. She's tougher than both of us combined."

"She's also reckless when she's upset."

Jackie's expression had done something complicated. "Yeah. She is."

The memory splinters, fragments. You're not sure if it happened exactly that way or if your brain is filling in gaps with things that feel true even if they aren't.

What you do remember, clearly and painfully, is the way Jackie used to watch you and Shauna together. Like she was cataloguing something, storing it away for later consideration. Like she knew something you hadn't figured out yet.

Movement catches your eye—a bird startling from the trees near camp.

Your heart jumps into your throat. You spin, hand automatically going to the knife at your belt, and—

They're back.

All of them, walking in a loose cluster. And between them, hands bound, being prodded along by Nat's rifle pressed against his spine, is Coach Scott.

Relief crashes through you so hard it's almost painful. They're safe. They're alive. Shauna's—

Shauna's face is carefully blank in that way that means she's barely holding it together. Her hands are clenched at her sides, knuckles white. There's dirt on her clothes, leaves in her hair, and something in her eyes that looks like she's seen something she can't unsee.

You start toward them, but Tai catches your eye and gives a tiny shake of her head. Not now.

So you hold back, watching as they march Coach Scott toward the animal coop Akilah built for the chickens that never materialized. The structure's crude but functional—rough-hewn logs lashed together, gaps wide enough to see through but too narrow to squeeze between.

Coach Scott doesn't resist as they lock him inside. Doesn't speak, doesn't meet anyone's eyes. He just sinks down against the far wall, looking smaller somehow than you remember.

The second the makeshift door is secured, the arguing starts.

"We should take him out." Shauna's voice is flat, matter-of-fact, like she's discussing what's for dinner instead of execution. "He tried to kill us. End of story."

"We don't even know his side yet," Nat argues, rifle still in her hands but pointed at the ground now. "Maybe Mari misunderstood what—"

"Misunderstood?" Shauna's laugh is sharp enough to cut. "He kept her captive, Nat. What part of that needs clarification?"

"I'm just saying we should hear him out before we—"

"Before we what? Give him another chance to burn us alive?" Shauna takes a step toward Nat, and you can see the tremor in her hands even from here. "Stop defending him."

Nat's face flushes. "I'm not defending anyone. I'm trying to be rational about this instead of jumping straight to murder because we're all scared and—"

"I'm not scared." But Shauna's voice cracks on the words, betraying her. "I'm being smart. He's a threat. We eliminate threats."

"Jesus Christ." Tai steps between them, hands raised in a placating gesture that immediately puts you on edge because Tai only intervenes when things are about to go truly sideways. "Can we all just take a breath before someone says something they can't take back?"

"Why?" Shauna's eyes are bright, wild. "So we can have a nice civilized discussion about whether to kill the man who tried to murder us in our sleep?"

"A trial." Tai's voice cuts through the rising chaos with unexpected authority. "We put it to a vote. Everyone gets to speak, including him. Then we decide as a group what to do."

"It shouldn't be up for debate." Shauna's jaw is so tight you're surprised her teeth don't crack. "This is survival, not student council."

"I'm on your side here," Tai says carefully. "I think he's dangerous. But if we're going to do this, we do it right. We're not animals."

The irony of that statement, given everything you've all done, everything you've eaten, hangs in the air like smoke.

Shauna stares at Tai for a long moment, something crumbling behind her eyes. Then she turns and walks away, not toward the huts or the fire, just away. Into the trees.

You don't think. You just follow.

You find her about fifty yards into the forest, sitting on a fallen log with her head in her hands. She doesn't look up when you approach, doesn't acknowledge your presence at all, but her shoulders tense in a way that means she knows you're there.

For a minute, you just stand there, uncertain. You're not good at this—the comfort thing, the being present without fixing thing. Your instinct is to fill silence with words, to offer solutions or distractions. But something about the set of Shauna's spine tells you that's not what she needs.

So you sit down beside her. Not touching, leaving a careful inch of space between you, but close enough that she knows you're there. That you're not leaving.

The forest breathes around you—wind through leaves, distant bird calls, the ever-present buzz of summer insects. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. The kind of mundane wilderness noise that has nothing to do with burning cabins or locked coaches or the weight of deciding whether someone lives or dies.

"I saw him," Shauna says suddenly, her voice so quiet you almost miss it. "In the cave."

You wait, not pushing, letting her find the words at her own pace.

"Not Coach Scott." Her hands are still covering her face, muffling her words.

Your breath catches. "Shauna—"

"I know it wasn't real." She finally drops her hands, and her eyes are red-rimmed but dry. Shauna doesn't cry, hasn't cried since the funeral. "I know it was just... the cave, or hunger, or my brain fucking with me. But for a second, it felt—" Her voice breaks. "He felt real."

You don't know what to say to that. What possible combination of words could make this better, could ease the particular hell of hallucinating your dead child in a dank cave while hunting down a man you might have to kill?

So you don't say anything. You just shift closer, closing that careful inch of space, and press your shoulder against hers.

Shauna goes rigid for a heartbeat, then slowly, incrementally, she leans into the contact. Not much. Not dramatically. Just enough to share the weight.

You sit like that as the afternoon bleeds toward evening, two broken people holding each other up in the most minimal way possible. It's not comfort, exactly. It's not fixing anything. But it's presence. It's witness. It's I'm here and you're not alone in this.

Eventually, you feel Shauna's breathing even out, the tension in her shoulders gradually releasing. She doesn't cry. Doesn't talk more about what she saw. But some of the wildness fades from her eyes, replaced by the bone-deep exhaustion you've all been carrying for months.

"We should go back," she says finally, but she doesn't move.

"Yeah," you agree, also not moving.

Five more minutes pass before either of you stands. The walk back to camp is quiet, shoulders occasionally brushing, the kind of companionable silence that used to come easy before everything got complicated.

But when you reach the edge of camp, Shauna stops. "Thank you," she says, so quiet you almost miss it. "For not... for just being there."

"Always," you reply, and mean it more than you probably should.

Then you're back in the chaos—people still arguing about the trial, about procedures, about the impossible weight of playing judge and jury when you're all just kids trying to survive.

You and Shauna split off to your separate corners, the moment of connection dissolving back into the careful distance you've been maintaining. But something has shifted, subtle as breath. Some wall has thinned, even if it hasn't fallen.

Later, much later, when the camp has finally settled into uneasy sleep, you lie awake listening to Shauna's breathing across the hut. It's uneven, hitching occasionally in a way that means she's having nightmares.

You don't go to her. Don't cross that space. But you stay awake, listening, ready to anchor her back to reality if the dreams get too bad.

It's the least you can do.

It's all you can do.

------

Shauna's dreaming.

She knows she's dreaming because the lake is too perfect, the water too blue, the sun too warm on her skin. Nothing in the wilderness looks this idyllic, this carefully composed.

The shore is close—maybe thirty feet—and on it, a scene that makes her heart physically ache: Jackie and you, sitting on a checkered blanket that definitely doesn't exist in real life. Between you, a little boy with light curls and her eyes.

Not the infant who never drew breath, but a child. Five, maybe six. Old enough to run and laugh and be a person instead of a possibility.

He sees her first. His whole face lights up, that pure uncomplicated joy only children can manage. He starts jumping, waving both arms over his head.

The action punches through her chest like a physical blow.

Jackie looks up, shading her eyes against the sun. She's smiling that smile—the real one, not the pageant-perfect version but the one that crinkles her nose slightly. She waves, casual and welcoming. Come on over.

You're smiling too, your hand ruffling the young boy's hair as he bounces with excitement. You gesture toward the water. The water's fine. Come swim.

Shauna's already moving, wading into the lake without thinking. The water's perfect temperature, sliding over her skin like silk. She's a strong swimmer—always has been. The shore is so close. Her family is right there, waiting.

Her boy's jumping up and down.

Such a normal thing. Such an impossible, beautiful, normal thing.

She strikes out toward them, confident. But after a few strokes, she realizes she's not getting any closer. The shore isn't receding exactly, but she's not making progress. Like swimming on a treadmill, all effort and no gain.

She pushes harder. Arms cutting through water, legs kicking, breath controlled. She's not panicking. Not yet. This is just water resistance, current, something physical and therefore solvable.

Shauna tries to shout, but water fills her mouth. She spits, tries again. "Just wait, I'm—"

The current strengthens. Not pulling her back exactly, just... preventing forward motion. She's swimming as hard as she can, arms burning with effort, lungs starting to ache, but the shore stays exactly the same distance away.

Jackie takes a step toward the water's edge. She's saying something, but Shauna can't hear over the splash of her own desperate swimming. Her son's reaching toward her now, his little hands grasping at air.

"Please," Shauna gasps. "Please—"

The lake grabs her ankle.

Not current. Not natural water movement. Something with intent, with grip, with the specific goal of pulling her down.

Then she's under.

Water in her lungs, in her mouth, in her eyes. She's being dragged down, down, into darkness that's too thick to be just water. There are shapes in the murk below her, moving, reaching.

She tries to scream but only bubbles emerge. Tries to kick but her legs are tangled in something—weeds, maybe, or hands, or—

The surface above her ripples with movement. Through the distorted water, she can see three silhouettes.

Watching her drown.

Not helping. Just watching.

He waves. A small, sad goodbye.

The darkness pulls harder, and—

Shauna wakes with a gasp that's too quiet to be called a scream but too violent to be normal breathing. Her heart is trying to punch through her ribs, her skin slick with sweat despite the cool night air.

For a disorienting moment, she can't remember where she is. The dream clings like cobwebs, the face of her child still burned into her retinas, the phantom sensation of drowning still tight in her chest.

Then reality filters back: the hut, the hard ground beneath her, the shape of you sleeping across the small space.

Except you're not sleeping. In the thin moonlight filtering through gaps in the walls, she can see your eyes are open, watching her.

"You okay?" you whisper, your voice rough with almost-sleep.

Shauna wants to say yes. Wants to brush it off, roll over, pretend the dream was nothing. But her throat is too tight, her chest too compressed with the weight of loss that never really leaves, just hides better some days than others.

"No," she admits, because it's too dark and too late and she's too tired to lie.

You don't push for details. Don't offer empty comfort. You just nod, a tiny movement in the darkness, and keep watching. Not invasive. Just present. A silent offer: I'm here if you need me.

Shauna closes her eyes again, knowing sleep won't come easy but trying anyway. The dream's images are already fading, becoming less vivid, but the feeling remains: her family on a shore she can't reach, disappearing while she drowns.