Chapter 33 Cody
The room is quiet now.
It took long enough. Two hours of faces and voices and everyone needing something from me — a smile, a laugh, a sign that I'm still the person they came to see. I gave them all of it. I always do.
The machines breathe their steady rhythm.
The IV drips. Outside the window, Seattle has gone dark, the city lights bleeding soft and orange through the glass, and I lie here in the silence that I've been waiting for since Adela walked through that door this morning and I felt something I couldn't immediately name.
I name it now.
Wrong.
Something was wrong.
Not obviously. Not in any way that the others would catch — Julian with his easy relief, Penelope with her coffee and her accidental bomb, Maeve with her arm through Adela's on the way out like she could hold her together through proximity alone. None of them saw it.
But I know Adela Kalkaska.
I have been studying her for two years; the way you study something you intend to keep.
Every tell. Every micro expression. The way her jaw tightens when she's swallowing something she'd rather say.
The way her eyes go to the middle distance when she's performing presence without actually being present.
The way she touches things — her necklace, the hem of her sleeve, the edge of whatever surface is nearest — when her hands need somewhere to go that isn't her face.
She touched the blanket on my bed four times.
She straightened my water cup.
She looked at the window instead of me when she talked about the transfer.
A girl who moved her entire life to this city as a surprise for the boy she loves should not be looking at windows.
I stare at the ceiling and turn it over slowly, the way my father taught me to turn over evidence. Not with emotion. With architecture. What do I know? What do I not know? What are the spaces between those two things, and what lives inside them?
What I know: She transferred to UW. She's been here for weeks.
She planned it before my birthday — months of planning, she said, a surprise she never got to give.
My father's face when Penelope said it. That particular tightness around his eyes that he thinks he hides and never does.
He knew she was here. He knew, and he didn't tell me.
That's its own conversation.
What I don't know: Everything else. Every day between my birthday and this morning. Every hour she spent on this campus that was supposed to be mine — my team, my rink, my city — while I was lying in a medically induced coma being kept alive by machines.
She was here.
Alone.
My jaw tightens.
I reach for my phone on the bedside table, moving carefully because my ribs still pull when I twist wrong, and my shoulder is still weak on the left side.
Small reminders of what someone decided to do to me.
Small reminders that I have not forgotten a single second of that night, no matter what I told the detective, no matter what I let my father believe about the gaps in my memory.
There are no gaps.
I remember everything.
I remember the house on Nob Hill. I remember leaving the party after Adela and her friends were gone, walking back inside, the specific shift in the air that told me something was wrong before I could see what it was.
I remember the hallway. I remember the first hit — clean, from behind, the kind of hit that knows exactly where to land.
I remember a voice.
I don't say any of that out loud. Not to the detective with his notepad and his sympathetic expression. Not to my father with his press statements and his careful management of my narrative. Not to anyone.
Because information is only useful if the other person doesn't know you have it.
My father taught me that, too.
I pull up Serena's contact and type: You awake?
The response comes in under a minute. She was waiting for me to reach out. She always waits for me to reach out. That's the thing about Serena — she has never once in her life pretended she isn't exactly where I left her.
Yeah. How are you feeling?
I stare at that for a moment. How am I feeling?
Better, I type back. Wanted to catch up. It's been a while.
Another fast response. I've missed you.
I know she has. I set the phone face down on my chest and look at the ceiling again.
Serena is many things, very few of them useful in polite company.
But she has one quality that I have always valued above the rest — she cannot help herself.
She knows things, and she says them. She observes, and she reports.
She was at that party. She has been on this campus.
She moves through the edges of my world like a satellite I've never had to program.
She already knows whatever there is to know.
I pick the phone back up.
“Tell me what I missed.”
She talks for forty minutes.
I ask small questions in the spaces — casual, curious, like we’re two friends catching up.
She tells me about the team, about Coach's mood, about the UCLA loss, and who she blames for it.
She tells me about campus, about a party she went to, about a girl in her Political Theory class who keeps giving wrong answers with complete confidence.
I wait.
She gets there eventually.
She always gets there.
"Beck's been weird," she says. The phrasing is careful in the way that means she's been thinking about how to say this. "Like, around."
"Around where?"
"Campus. More than usual." A pause. "Near the dorms mostly. Elm Hall."
The name lands in my chest like a stone dropped in still water. I watch the ripples move outward and keep my voice easy. "Yeah? Visiting someone?"
"I mean." She makes a sound that is trying very hard to be neutral. "Probably."
"Who do you think?"
Silence. The specific silence of someone deciding whether to say the thing they came here to say.
"Serena."
"I don't know for sure," she says quickly. "I just saw him a few times. And your girl's been around campus, so I just— I don't know. I don't want to start anything."
Your girl.
"You're not starting anything," I say warmly. "I appreciate you telling me. It's good to know people were looking out for her while I was out."
She relaxes. "Of course. She seems like she's doing okay. She's been at the library a lot."
"The library." I keep every trace of anything out of my voice. "Studious."
"I guess. I've seen her up on the third floor a few times. Political science section." Another pause. "She's usually not alone."
The ripples move outward.
"Good," I say. "I'm glad she had company."
We talked for another ten minutes about nothing. I thank her. I tell her to visit soon. I hang up and set the phone on my chest and lie very still in the dark hospital room and breathe through it.
Beckett.
Near Elm Hall. More than usual. Your girl.
The library. Third floor. Not alone.
I think about Adela's hands on my blanket. The water cup. The window.
I think about the way she said of course when I asked if we were okay. Two words, perfectly delivered, exactly right.
Adela Kalkaska is many things. She is beautiful, composed, and trained from birth to perform with grace under pressure.
I have always loved that about her. I chose her partly because of it — a girl who can sit at a table with people she despises and make them feel chosen.
That's not nothing. In the world I come from, that's almost everything.
But she is not a liar.
She never learned how because she never needed to.
The girl who sat on the edge of my hospital bed today was lying. Fluently. Completely. Without a single visible seam.
Something happened to her while I was gone.
Someone happened to her.
I reach up and press two fingers against the bridge of my nose and breathe.
In. Out. The way my father taught me when I was twelve years old, after I lost my first moot court exercise, and wanted to put my fist through the wall.
Emotion is a resource, he said. Spend it where it earns something. Everywhere else, you save it.
I save it now.
Instead, I think about Beckett.
Beckett, whom I have known since freshman year.
I brought him into my orbit because he was useful — steady and smart and the kind of loyal that doesn't ask too many questions.
Beckett, who stood in the hallway the night of the party and introduced himself to Adela with those blue eyes and that careful expression.
Beckett, whom I trusted with proximity because I never thought proximity was a risk.
I was wrong.
And I don't make the same mistake twice.
My ribs pull when I breathe too deep. I let the pain sit there, clear and useful, a small, regular reminder. In the window, the city glitters indifferently.
She transferred here for me. Months of planning. A surprise she never got to give. She moved her entire life to this campus, and then I ended up in a bed, and she was here alone, and someone — Beckett, the library, not alone, Elm Hall — was there.
I think about her face when she said we're okay. The steadiness of it. The perfect, terrible steadiness.
She's not the girl I left at the party.
Someone rebuilt her into something else while I was gone, and I don't yet know what that something is, and I don't know who else had their hands on what belongs to me.
But I'm going to find out.
I pick up my phone one more time.
I don't text anyone. I just hold it.
Outside the window, Seattle breathes its cold, wet breath against the glass, and I lie here in the quiet and make myself a promise that I don't say out loud because promises made out loud are promises that can be held against you.
I am going to find out everything.
And then I am going to remind every single person in this world exactly who she belongs to.
For the first time since I woke up, I close my eyes and fall asleep easily.