Chapter 3
ARCHIE
I’d spent years believing he was healed.
Surviving the fire. Writing a memoir. Crossing some invisible finish line I was still crawling toward.
Now, I wasn’t so sure.
Maybe he hadn’t healed at all. Maybe he’d just learned how to build something impressive out of the wreckage and make it look intentional.
My mother used to do that—take broken things apart and reassemble them into something useful. She built something that passed for normal if you didn’t look too closely, and I admired her for it even while I watched it hollow her out.
“Archibald,” Rhys said, somewhere to my left. “If you disassociate any harder, I’m calling an ambulance.”
“I’m thinking.”
A dumpling hit me square in the cheek.
It startled the hell out of me—enough to snap me back into my body as grease slid traitorously down my cheek. I sucked in a breath and turned around.
Rhys stood by the stove, wooden spoon in one hand, the other reaching for another dumpling like he was prepared to double down.
His hair was still damp, pale strands catching on the overhead light in a way that made him look unfairly composed for someone who’d just committed an act of food violence.
“Welcome back,” he said. “You left your body for a minute.”
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “You just threw food at me.”
“You stopped responding to verbal stimuli.”
I leaned back against the counter, crossing one ankle over the other.
The apartment smelled like sesame oil and garlic, cut with the lemon cleaner Rhys used obsessively. It was familiar enough that my chest eased.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to zone out.”
“You absolutely meant to zone out,” he laughed. “This is your spot. Right here. You stare at that wall like it’s going to confess something.”
“Fuck you.” I huffed, grabbing a towel and rubbing it across my cheek. “It’s a very thinkable wall.”
“It’s your dissociation hotspot. I should put up a plaque.”
I threw the towel at him, and he laughed harder, using the spoon to gesture toward the space above the sink where the paint had gone uneven, faintly darker from the time the pipes burst.
I didn’t know why I gravitated toward it, only that I did—maybe because it was imperfect, or maybe because I knew if I stood here long enough, Rhys would feed me.
“Sit.” He nudged a stool with his foot, the wood scraping softly against the floor. “Before you zone out again.”
“I’m fine.”
“Archibald.” He made a noise. “You’ve been fine since approximately never.”
I hesitated for half a second, then climbed onto the stool, toes curling against the rung. The microwave blinked 7:47PM. It had been hours since the interview—long enough for the adrenaline to burn off and leave the rest of it sitting there, unresolved.
Rhys slid a plate in front of me. Steam curled upward, clouding my glasses and warming my cheeks.
The dumplings were golden and uneven, some darker than others, like he’d been flipping them without really looking while pretending not to wait for me to come back to myself.
Rhys folded his arms across his chest and watched me eat with a quiet attentiveness he pretended was casual. He’d been doing that for years—clocking my spirals before I named them and dragging me back with humor, or silence… or dumplings.
“You got the job.”
It wasn’t a question. Rhys had always been a little too certain. The dude was allergic to drama unless he was the one instigating it.
“I did.”
He grinned. “Rothwell would’ve been a fucking idiot not to choose you. You’re smart as hell when it comes to trauma. A little fucked up, but hey, who isn’t?”
“Rhys, literally everyone who applied is smart as hell.”
“Not as smart as you. I’m proud of you, Arch.”
My stomach squeezed with gratitude, and even though I loved my best friend, I wasn’t always convinced I’d earned the kind of belief he had in me.
It felt like he was working off a version of me I hadn’t met yet.
The kitchen was small enough that we were always aware of each other, even when we weren’t speaking.
The fridge hummed too loud, the cabinet doors never lined up, and the drawer with the silverware stuck unless you lifted it just right.
The whole apartment hovered on the edge of falling apart… but somehow, it held.
Just like us.
We met sophomore year of undergrad in the back row of a lecture neither of us were paying attention to, and somehow he decided I was worth keeping.
Rhys looked like the kind of person who didn’t have to try to be put together—sharp features, light eyes, the kind of presence people noticed without knowing why—which made it deeply unfair that he also ate cold pizza for breakfast like a raccoon with good bone structure.
“So.” He pushed another dumpling toward me. “Was he everything you dreamed?”
I groaned. “Do not say it like that.”
“Archibald, you’re obsessed with that man’s memoir. You quoted it to me when I got dumped last month. I am legally entitled to ask.”
“That was contextual,” I argued. “And emotionally relevant.”
“You said, ‘Resilience is not recovery.’” His nostrils flared with his laugh. “It was not that deep.”
“I was making a point.”
“You were being horny about trauma.”
I choked on my dumpling. “That is not—okay, first of all, jail.”
He smiled like he’d been waiting for that. “So?”
“He wasn’t… what people expect.”
“Meaning?”
“He doesn’t lean into the mythology. He doesn’t talk about surviving like it made him special. It’s just a fact. Something that happened to him and never really stopped.”
My gaze dropped.
“He makes it look simple. Like he took something awful and turned it into something people respect. Something useful. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out how to carry my own mess without leaving pieces of it behind.”
“Healing doesn’t come with a syllabus, Min v?n.”
“Doesn’t it though? There’s literally a class on his roster called Trauma, Recovery, and the Limits of Resilience. Sounds pretty syllabus-adjacent to me.”
Rhys didn’t answer right away. He shifted, tugging at the cuff of his sweater like it was warmer in here than he’d expected.
It was the dark green one he’d brought back from Sweden years ago.
The sleeves were pushed up just enough to expose the thin line work along his forearm—a series of mountain peaks from back home.
Rhys wore his history where you could see it, but mine didn’t work like that.
“Easy is a performance, Arch. We only see the parts people rehearse. You don’t actually know what it cost him.”
I frowned. “How do you figure?”
“Archibald. He survived when other people didn’t. You really think there isn’t weight under that?”
“I didn’t say there wasn’t.”
“You didn’t have to, but now you’ve gone and met the very hot, very accomplished man who survived something awful and somehow still looks like he has his shit together.”
“That is not—”
“And now you’re spiraling because it’s extremely fucking rude of him to be both intimidating and attractive.”
Heat crawled up my neck. “I’m not spiraling.”
“You adjusted your glasses three times.”
Goddamnit.
I opened my mouth, then closed it again.
“I’m not judging,” he said. “Rothwell is hot as hell and terrifyingly competent. I get it.”
My thoughts were scrambling, overlapping faster than I could sort them, like I’d shaken the alphabet and expected words to fall out.
Undergrad had trained me to notice patterns—and Henry Rothwell had been doing something very specific.
He didn’t come across as relaxed, and he didn’t come across as at ease; everything about him read as controlled in the way people learn when they’ve figured out exactly how much of themselves is acceptable to show.
Some fucked up part of me recognized that immediately, not because I wanted to romanticize it, even though part of me probably did, but because I’d spent years studying the difference between resilience and performance and knew what it looked like when someone blurred the line.
“He didn’t talk like someone who’d moved on. He talked like someone who’d gotten very good at not being asked follow-up questions.”
Rhys watched me closely now, lips flat and eyes a little too knowing. “That sounds like a you observation.”
“I guess so.”
Because the truth was, I wasn’t projecting blindly. I was recognizing something I’d spent years learning how to name, and this time it was looking back at me.
“I don’t think he’s faking it. I think he’s… selective at who he shows his pain to.”
“Makes sense,” Rhys hummed. “The guy is being watched by an entire institution that wants him to be the poster child for inspiration.”
I swallowed, heat still lingering in my palm where Henry’s hand had been earlier.
Some fractured, inconvenient part of me had clocked him the same way he’d clocked me, and that recognition felt less like attraction and more like being seen in a language I hadn’t agreed to speak out loud.
“You are absolutely going to fall in love with him.”
“Jesus Christ—” I choked, coughing hard enough that I had to grab my water. “That is not what’s happening. I do not fall in love with professors I met once in an interview.”
“You absolutely do. You just call it ‘academic interest’ and pretend it’s not horny.”
“I am not—”
“I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying it’s obvious. He’s smart, he’s composed, he looks at you like you’re interesting instead of fragile, and he survived something that rewired his entire life.”
I swallowed, forcing myself to chew. “That’s not why.”
“Sure,” he said. “But it’s not not why.”
I stared at that spot on the wall again. “He looked at me like he knew what I was. Not my résumé. Me.”
Rhys didn’t joke this time. He let the silence stretch, which was somehow worse. “That look usually means you’re already halfway gone.”
I huffed a laugh. “That’s not a thing.”
But it sure as hell felt like one.
Something in me had already tipped forward, like my body had hit accept while my brain was still reading the terms and conditions.
I kept replaying the way Henry sat across from me, every movement deliberate enough to feel chosen instead of natural. I wondered what kind of pressure it would take to crack that composure?
I wanted to open him up just enough to see what he kept buried and then stitch him back together wrong on purpose. I wanted to leave marks he’d have to carry quietly… the same way he carried everything else.
Fuck.
I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to lose myself completely or remember every second of the interview in vicious detail, but either way, I knew it wouldn't be forgettable.
Nothing about him was forgettable.
Rhys shifted his weight, arms folding loosely as he looked at me like he was enjoying this a little too much. “Best-case scenario, you fall in love with him in a deeply inconvenient, slow-motion way that ruins your concentration and your sleep schedule.”
I grimaced.
“Worst-case scenario, you let him rail you against his bookshelves.”
Heat shot up my neck so fast I had to grip the edge of the stool, pulling my knees in like that would make it any less obvious.
Rhys made a noise. “Oh my god.”
“Shut up.”
“You just short-circuited.” His grin widened. “I mentioned bookshelves, and you froze.”
I exhaled through my nose, jaw setting as I stared at the table. “That still isn’t the point.”
“Isn’t it though? You’re not horrified. You’re barely scandalized.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Goddamn it.
“And for the record,” Rhys added, “wanting him doesn’t make you ridiculous. It makes you human… and super gay.”
A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it.
“You start Monday, yeah?”
I nodded, pulse tripping a little.
“Great.” He smacked his hands together. “You have exactly one weekend to spiral responsibly."
“Spiral responsibly?” I snorted. “That’s not a thing.”
“It is now.” Leaning across the counter, he poked me square in the chest. “You’ll show up to work pretending you’re normal, and I’ll go to my meeting at eight where a man named Carl is going to explain synergy to me with a straight face. We’ll both be suffering.”
I slapped at his hand, laughter spilling from my mouth. “You could’ve stayed in Sweden, you know?”
“And miss this?” He gestured vaguely at the apartment. “Why, Archibald… I would never.”
Gratitude settled in my chest, the kind that didn’t need to be named out loud to be real. Rhys had been there for every version of me worth surviving. He’d watched me unravel, rebuild, and never once tried to hurry the process or make it prettier for public consumption.
He carried his plate to the sink and set it down with a soft clink, then paused, leaning his hip against the counter and glancing at me sideways.
“When you inevitably marry him, do I get to be maid of honor, or are you going to make me stand on the groom’s side like some kind of trad nightmare?”
I snorted. “You are not my maid of honor.”
“Rude,” he said. “I look phenomenal in formalwear.”
I rolled my eyes, but my traitorous pulse jumped anyway, and even as I laughed, something quieter in me had already moved ahead, reaching toward a future I wasn’t ready to look at directly.