Chapter 36 Beckett
The flight back from Denver lands at six in the morning.
I'm off the plane and in my truck by six forty-five, gear bag in the back, and exhausted. Not by the game but the locker room. Theo's face when Coach Crick said Cody's name, and the room erupted, and I watched something go out behind Theo's eyes like a light switched off at the source.
He held it together.
But I've known Theo for years and I know what it looks like when he's holding something with both hands that doesn't want to stay held.
I drive back to my apartment through an empty Seattle morning, the city still mostly asleep, the roads gray and wet and quiet.
I should go home, shower, and sleep for a few hours before the afternoon skate Coach scheduled as penance for the loss.
I should eat something. I should do any number of things that a person with a functioning sense of self-preservation would do.
Instead, I find myself taking the long route.
The one that goes past campus.
I pass the quad, pass the academic buildings with their lights coming on floor by floor as the morning advances, pass the IMA, where in six hours I'll be back on the ice, pretending my ribs still don't ache from Denver's first line deciding I was a message worth sending.
Elm Hall.
I slow down without stopping.
Fifth floor. Her window is on the east side. The light is off. Either she's asleep, or she's already gone, already somewhere else, already moving through a day I'm not part of.
I pull back into traffic and drive home.
I drop my gear bag by the door and don't unpack it. I shower and then stand in the kitchen and look at the contents of my refrigerator for a long time without taking anything out.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Theo: Afternoon skate at two. Be sharp.
I type back: Yeah.
Theo: You went past her building.
I stare at that for a moment.
He couldn't have seen me. He was in his own car. Unless he took the same route, which means he was doing the same thing I was doing, which means neither of us is going to acknowledge that directly because acknowledging it directly would require saying something true out loud.
I type, Get some sleep.
I put the phone face down and make coffee. I drink it standing at the window, looking out at the gray Seattle morning, and think about what Theo said in that Denver locker room.
One word stands out.
Together.
One word, quietly delivered, no ceremony around it. After weeks of distance and divided loyalty, and me navigating the space between what I was supposed to be doing and what I was actually doing, one word and something that had been pulled taut for too long just released.
I know what together costs Theo. I know what it costs him to need anything from another person. That word in that locker room was the closest he would ever come to saying, "I can't do this without you," and we both understood that without either of us saying it.
Cody is awake.
Fuck.
Full recovery, Coach said. Like that was good news. Like the room was supposed to cheer and I was supposed to cheer with it, and I did — I made the right sounds, I wore the right expression — because that's what I do. I perform what the moment requires and file the truth somewhere quieter.
The truth is that Cody waking up changes everything.
Not just for Theo. For everyone. Especially for Adela. For Nessa.
I think about the way she looked when she sent me home. When she told me, I don't want to do this with you anymore.
She meant that.
I know she meant it.
And I know she meant something else underneath it too — not that she doesn't want me, but that she can't afford to want anything right now when everything is already so complicated and so dangerous and so far outside what she signed up for when she transferred to this campus for a boy who was already something she didn't know yet.
I finish my coffee.
I set the mug in the sink.
My phone buzzes again.
I expect Theo.
It's not Theo.
Unknown number.
Interesting. I never get unknown numbers. The phone is good at detecting spam now, but this isn’t that.
Unknown: Are you back from Denver?
I look at those five words for a long moment.
She reached out.
She found a way to reach out, but why is she using a different number?
I type back immediately. Then I stop. Delete it. Write it again, slower.
Me: Yeah. Just got back. You okay?
I watch the three dots appear.
Disappear.
Appear again.
Unknown: I need to ask you something. Not over the phone.
Me: Tell me where.
She picks the coffee shop two blocks from Elm Hall.
It’s a small place, but it takes its beans seriously and its aesthetic even more seriously.
I get there first and take a table near the back, where I can see the door, and order two coffees because I know how she takes hers, and that knowledge sits in me now like a hundred other small things I was never supposed to accumulate.
She comes in at eight forty-five.
Black coat, hair down, the composure she wears like armor. But I have to give it to her, she’s good at it.
She spots me immediately and crosses the room without hesitating, sits down across from me, and wraps both hands around the coffee cup I pushed toward her before she could ask.
She looks tired.
Not the exhaustion of someone who hasn't slept. The quiet tiredness of someone who has been thinking too hard for too long, and the thinking hasn't resolved into anything clean yet.
"Thank you for coming," she says.
"You asked."
She nods, looks at her coffee, and then up at me. "How was Denver?"
"We lost."
Something moves across her face. "I'm sorry."
I lean back in my chair. "What is it?"
She wraps her hands tighter around the cup. Outside the window, the morning moves past — people, umbrellas, the gray Seattle business of a Tuesday in November. She watches it for a moment like she's organizing something.
Then she looks at me directly.
"The night they broke into my room," she says. "The masked men."
Every muscle in my body goes very still.
"I've been thinking about it." Her voice is steady. "There were two of them. They were organized. They knew the layout of where I live. They knew I had the laptop." She pauses.
I say nothing, waiting.
"That's not random," she says. "That's not opportunistic. Someone told them." She holds my gaze. "Or someone already knew."
The coffee shop moves around us. Someone orders at the counter. Music plays low from a speaker near the door. Everything is completely ordinary and completely irrelevant.
"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.
"Because you were there." Her eyes don't leave mine. "You were in that room. They hurt you." A beat. "And I've been thinking about the fact that you showed up to my hospital visit with a broken finger and I never asked you how you broke it."
The silence between us has weight.
I look at her. She’s been busy assembling a picture piece by piece, and now she's showing me what she's built so far and waiting to see what I do with it.
But she doesn't have everything.
Though she has more than I thought.
"Adela—"
"I'm not accusing you of anything," she says quietly. "I just need to know if I can trust you."
The words land somewhere soft and undefended.
Can she trust me.
I think about Theo in the Denver locker room. Together. I think about the text I sent after that night — she's going to lean on me now, that was always the goal — and how that goal has become something I can't look at directly anymore without feeling…discomfort.
I think about the way she felt against my chest and how I lay there in the dark thinking that Theo had miscalculated something, and I wasn't sure yet if it was her or me.
It was me.
It was always me.
I lean forward, putting my elbows on the table. I glance at her across the small space of a coffee shop table and make a decision I know I'm going to have to live with.
"Not yet," I say.
She blinks. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn't that.
"Not yet?" she repeats.
"I can't tell you everything right now." I keep my voice low and even. "Not because I don't want to. Because the timing matters, and if I tell you the wrong thing at the wrong moment, it makes everything worse for you. Not for me." I hold her gaze. "For you."
She searches my face.
"But I need you to listen to me about one thing," I say.
"What?"
"Cody is going to ask you to dinner." I watch her face carefully when I say it. "At his father's house. Just the two of you." A pause. "Don't go alone."
The color doesn't leave her face. She doesn't gasp, panic, or do any of the things a person does when information surprises them. She goes very still.
"How do you know that?" she asks.
"Because I know him," I say.
She looks at me for a long moment. The coffee shop moves around us. The music plays. Seattle continues its gray, indifferent morning without us.
"Okay," she says finally.
Just that.
Okay.
She picks up her coffee and looks out the window, and I watch her process it — not with fear, not with tears, with that cold, quiet intelligence that has been growing sharper every week since she got to this campus.
She came here for a boy who was already something she didn't know.
She stayed and became something none of us planned for.
"Beckett," she says, still looking out the window.
"Yeah."
"When the timing is right." She turns and looks at me. "Tell me everything."
It's not a question.
"Yeah," I say.
"Promise me."
I look at her across the table. At the girl who arrived on this campus with one suitcase and nothing on her walls and has been quietly, methodically, alone and without allies, assembling the truth out of fragments and margin notes and things people almost said.
"I promise," I say.
She nods once.
And just like that, she trusts me.
She finishes her coffee, and then she’s pulling her coat around her in the doorway, and I watch her go. Now I have to sit with the weight of a promise I just made that is going to cost me everything I owe Theo.
My phone buzzes on the table.
Theo: You're not home.
I look at the message.
Then I look at the door she just walked through.
I type back: I'll be at skate on time.
I put the phone in my pocket, leave a tip on the table, and walk out into the cold gray morning, and don't tell him where I've been.
For the first time since any of this started, I don't tell Theo something.
It feels like the first honest thing I've done in months.