CHAPTER FOUR
TEN YEARS OLD
· · ·
He kept me guessing constantly.
That was the thing about Cassian that got under my skin so early. Just when I thought I understood him, he’d shift. Say something unexpected. Do something that didn’t fit.
Intense one minute, ridiculous the next.
The kind of person you couldn’t look away from because you never knew what you were going to get.
I loved that about him.
I wish I’d been more careful about how much.
Because I didn’t see it then — the distance he kept. How deliberate it was. How vast. I was just happy.
Life felt complete in the way it only does when you’re ten and don’t know yet that things can be taken from you.
Best friend. Amazing parents. School was easy. Home was warm.
I had everything I needed.
I just didn’t know to hold onto it.
It was around this time I started hearing things.
Not directly — nobody tells you anything directly at ten. But between my parents and his, in the gaps adults leave when they think you’re not listening, something was off.
Cassian was getting in trouble at school.
At risk of being left behind.
The word I kept hearing was distant.
I sat with that for a long time.
Turned it over and over and couldn’t make it fit the person I knew. I had a million words for Cassian.
Could fill a thousand pages with who I thought he was. Not one of them would be distant.
If anything, his mom had gone distant, calling less and less.
My mom mentioned it once to my dad, low-voiced, when she thought I was asleep. Something in her tone that I’d never heard from her before. Careful. Like she was trying not to make it bigger than it was, and wasn’t sure she was succeeding.
I didn’t understand what I was hearing.
I just knew something felt different next door.
Something that had always been quietly wrong was getting louder.
My bedroom was on the first floor — my parents upstairs, me down the hall from the kitchen, my window level with the grass. It had never felt significant before. Just the way the house was laid out.
But Cassian figured it out fast.
After the first week we met he stopped using the front door entirely.
Window up, leg over the edge, books already in hand like he’d been doing it for years. My mom must have noticed — she noticed everything — but she never said a word. Just started leaving an extra snack on my desk around the time he usually arrived.
· · ·
Every day after school — books out, homework across the floor. I’d go through everything, teach him what I knew. Which was a lot for my age, given the tuition my parents paid.
I didn’t say that. I just taught him.
He hated it.
He’d huff. Pace. Throw his pencil down and stare at the ceiling like it had personally offended him.
Then pick it back up.
I didn’t mind.
Anything I could give to him, I did.
Every part of myself that was good was Cassian’s.
At the end of every session he’d pack up slowly.
Like he wasn’t quite ready to go either.
And right before he climbed back out the window he’d turn back.
Quick hug.
Over before you could decide what to do with your arms.
And then, quiet enough that I almost missed it every time —
Thank you .
Like he meant more than just the studying and didn’t know how to say that part.
I never said you’re welcome.
I didn’t want to make it smaller than it was.