Chapter 47 Cody
She opens the door, and her face does three things in under a second.
Surprise. Recognition. Fear.
Not the polite kind. Not the startled kind you feel when someone knocks unexpectedly. The fear of someone who has something to hide and has just opened the door to the person they're hiding it from.
She doesn't relax when she sees me.
That tells me everything I need to know about how today went.
This morning started early.
I drove to her parents' house at seven — not to see her parents, they weren't there, they're never there on weekends, a fact I know because I've been dating their daughter for two years and have learned their rhythms. The housekeeper let me in because she knows my face.
I said I needed to grab something in Adela's room, and she waved me through.
I found all three cameras in two minutes.
One in the smoke detector above her desk. One in the vent above her bed. One in the small carved wooden frame on her dresser that I bought for her.
I removed them carefully, put them in my jacket pocket, and left the way I came.
Back at my father's house, I set up my new laptop on the desk in my room and spent the next few hours going through the footage.
It's a lot.
Weeks of it. Day by day, night by night, the mundane recorded life of a girl who had no idea she was being watched in her own bedroom. I skip through most of it — her at her desk studying, her on the phone, her sleeping. Normal. Everything normal.
And then I find it.
Early morning hours. The timestamp reads 2:47 AM. The room is dark, and I almost skip past it because it looks like nothing, like every other night, like a girl asleep in her bed.
Then the door opens.
I sit forward.
A figure. Another one. Another one. Three all dressed in black with masks on. I watch them search her room, but one crosses it and stops beside her bed. He stands there looking down at her while she sleeps.
I pause the footage.
I lean in close to the screen.
The posture.
I know that posture. I know the specific way those shoulders sit, the way that body distributes its weight when it's standing still. I have skated beside that posture. I have stood in locker rooms beside it, sat in film sessions beside it.
Bastard.
The footage is dark and grainy. The figure is wearing all black, but it doesn't matter. I know exactly who is standing over my sleeping girlfriend.
The heat moves through all at once — up from my stomach, into my chest, behind my eyes, the burning liquid rage of something that has been simmering since I woke up in a hospital bed and remembered every second of the night that put me there.
He put me in a coma.
And then he went into her room while she slept.
He stood over her in the dark.
My hands are flat on the desk, and I am pressing them there deliberately because the alternative is putting one of them through the screen, and I need the screen. I need the footage. I need every single second of it.
I press play.
I watch all of it.
By the time I close the laptop, I am completely calm.
They are going to wish they had finished what they started.
Then I called Julian.
He came over at nine.
He sat across from me at the kitchen table with his easy expression, and I watched him decide, over the course of seven minutes of careful conversation, that telling me the truth was less dangerous than continuing to manage it.
He was right.
"She had the laptop," he said. "I took it to Gary to unlock a video, but I made sure he knew only to expose one. I wanted her to stop digging."
I looked at him.
"That’s all, though, and she threw a fit. She accused me of putting you in a coma. She was scared, and—" He stopped. "I knew you’d come to me when you were ready for the truth."
"Yes," I said.
"Cody—"
"Which one did she see?"
He told me exactly which video it was and who it was with.
I sat with my coffee going cold, and I listened. Then I needed him to leave. I thanked him for coming and showed him to the door.
I stood in my father's hallway for a long moment after it closed.
She watched one video.
She knows.
She has known since before I woke up, and she sat on the edge of my hospital bed, held my hand, and said, of course, we're okay with that, steady, perfect face, and she knew.
My girl.
My brilliant, composed, perfectly performing girl.
She looked me in the eyes, and she lied.
She did it so well that I almost missed it.
Almost.
The room behind her smells like someone else.
I clock it immediately — cologne, something clean and familiar that I can't place yet but will.
Her bed is unmade in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.
Her coat is on the floor. Books everywhere on every surface in a way that is not how Adela keeps spaces because Adela keeps spaces ordered, always has, the daughter of a mayor who learned early that the appearance of control matters.
This room looks like someone who stopped performing for the walls.
When did that happen?
"Cody," she says, breathless. "What are you doing here?"
"Are you allowed to be out and about?" she asks, which is the wrong question delivered in the wrong order. She's buying herself seconds to compose. "Shouldn't you be resting?"
"Why? Are you hiding something?" I ask flatly.
Her eyes widen for exactly one second before she pulls it back. "What?"
I let my eyes move down her body. The tension in her shoulders. The way she's standing slightly sideways in the doorframe instead of fully opening the door.
"Who were you talking to?"
"I just got off the phone with Maeve." She sounds like she's finally found her footing. "She wanted to know how last night went."
I pause. "And how did it go?"
She starts turning red. "It was good."
"Just good?"
She watches me. "You're alive, and we had a date. It doesn't get better than that."
I walk past her into the room.
She turns to follow me with her eyes, but doesn't move from the door. I walk slowly. Taking inventory. The unmade bed. The coat on the floor.
"And still," I say, looking out her window at the parking lot below. "You're hiding things from me."
"I'm not hiding anything."
"I know about the laptop, Adela."
She stills, not saying a word.
Smart girl.
"Julian told me."
Her mouth opens and closes. Her eyes stay alert, watching me the way she's been watching me since the hospital.
"What did he tell you?"
I turn around and lean against her desk and cross my arms. "The entire thing." I look at her. "So you've been keeping a little secret all to yourself, I see."
"You're still recovering from a horrible thing that happened to you." Her voice is careful. "Your dad said—"
I shake my head and smile. "That's the thing. You think you're playing a role to protect me."
Her eyes hold mine.
"But instead you're lying."
"I didn't know what else I was supposed to do."
"Give me the laptop."
She drops her hands. "Why do you care so much about the laptop?"
"I know about the masked men."
The color leaves her face so completely and so fast that it's almost beautiful.
I smile. "You keep hiding things from me." I cross toward her. "And I thought you were my girl."
Tears fill her eyes.
"Baby." I stop in front of her. "You are my girl. But I need you to tell me the truth."
She swallows. "Fine. They took it."
"Who's they?"
"The ones in the masks."
I lick my teeth. She's holding something back still, and I don’t fucking like it. "Do you know who they are?"
She shakes her head.
I reach out and take her chin in my fingers, tilting her face up. "Adela."
"I've been trying to figure it out this whole time," she says. "I don't know."
"Is it the guy you've been meeting at the library?"
I didn't think she could get paler.
I run my fingertips down the side of her face slowly. "You shouldn't have transferred here, babe. How do I know it wasn’t you who put me in a coma?"
The first tear falls as she gasps. I watch it track down her cheek and drip off her jaw.
"Crying only makes you look guilty."
"I would never do that to you. I… I… You should go."
I tilt my head, needing her to finish her sentence.
She shakes herself out of it, wiping her face. "I want to end things."
"End things," I say.
She nods and wipes her face again. "I want to break up with you."
Those words land in my chest and detonate into something liquid and hot that moves through every vein in my body. She wants to break up with me? The scorching burn turns into a throbbing ache.
She doesn't get to do that.
"Break up," I repeat.
More tears.
I clench my jaw and lean in. "You're leaving with me right now."
She shakes her head. "No."
I reach for her. She steps back. "No."
I step forward, and she stumbles against the dresser behind her, her hands finding the edge of it. "Stop. We’re done."
"No.”
I lean in close until I'm all she can see. "If you don't leave with me right now." I hold her gaze. "I'm going to burn this building down."
Her eyes search my face. "You wouldn't."
"I would."
She believes me. I see it move through her — not because she thinks I'm irrational but because she knows me well enough to know I'm not.
I take a step back and tilt my head toward the door. "Let's go."
She gets into my passenger seat without speaking.
The door closes. I start the engine. She stares straight ahead at the gray Sunday outside the windshield.
"Where are you taking me?"
I pull out of the lot and don't answer.
She sits with her hands in her lap, and her face remains composed, just like her mommy and daddy taught her. She looks out the window, watches the campus disappear behind us, and says nothing else.
Good.
We drive for twenty minutes.
When I pull up and throw the car in park, I turn to look at her.
She won’t look at me.
But I stare at her because she’s the girl I have been in love with since the moment I met her.
And she's not going anywhere.
I knew from the moment I saw her that she would be mine.
Not a feeling. Not a slow realization. A fact.
I was across a room, and she was in a blue dress, saying something that made everyone around her laugh, and she didn't laugh — just watched them with those eyes, completely still, completely unimpressed by her own effect on a room.
I thought: that one.
Two words. Done. No doubt about it.
I have not looked at her since and thought anything different.
She thinks the laptop changes something.
She watched those videos and built a case against me the way her father's constituents build cases — with conviction and without all the facts.
Those women were transactions. Meaningless.
The difference between eating because you're hungry and sitting down to a meal that actually matters.
She is the meal that matters.
She is the only thing in my life I have never been casual about.
She said I want to break up as if the words had weight. Like they were load-bearing, standing in her dorm room with tears on her face, her voice steady, that backbone she grew while I was unconscious, holding her upright.
I almost respected it.
But she's mine. That's not sentiment. That's not love in the way people use that word when they mean something soft and negotiable.
It's ownership. Total, decided, non-transferable.
I knew it at a party in a blue dress, and I have known it every day since, and I will know it long after she stops fighting it.
I'm going to marry her.
I decided that in week three, and nothing that has happened — the laptop, the library, the man whose cologne was still in her room when I walked in — has touched that decision. Those things made me angry. They didn't make me uncertain.
Uncertainty has never been my problem.
She can cry. She can run. She can transfer to any university on the West Coast, and I will follow her to every single one.
She doesn't get to end this.
Nobody ends this but me.
"I love you, Adela," I say.
She looks at me.
"That's why I'm doing this."
"Doing what?"
I reach into my pocket to grab a small white pill in my palm. I hold it out toward her. "Open your mouth. It's just to relieve your nerves."
"No."
I look at her. "Adela."
"Whatever you want to do to me," she says, "I want to be aware. Not high."
I look at her for a long moment.
Then I put the pill away.
"Suit yourself." I hold her gaze. "Say the word, and I'll give it to you."
She doesn't respond.
"What are you doing to me?" she asks.
I reach into the back seat.
I hold up the blindfold.
She stares at it.
"It's a surprise," I say.
And I reach over.