VIII
I didn’t realize I was backing up until the rough brick of the gym wall scraped between my shoulder blades.
He kept coming anyway.
The distance collapsed inch by agonizing inch until Heaton stopped, leaving a sliver of space between us that felt more intimate than a touch.
He didn’t look surprised.
He didn’t even look irritated.
“That pillar?” he said, eyes flicking past me toward the corner I’d tried to hide behind. “You may as well have lit a flare.”
Heat flooded my face. “So, what—were you waiting for me?”
One corner of his mouth tipped up, but there was nothing warm in it.
“Let’s call it predictable curiosity. You see something you don’t understand; you follow it.”
His silver eyes narrowed.
“Must run in the family.”
The words landed cold.
“I take it you’re not a fan of my dad’s work.”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, I’m not anything like him.”
“No?”
He shifted closer, his shadow swallowing mine.
“Then you’re either the best liar I’ve met, or you’re so deep in denial you’ve forgotten which way is up.”
I lifted my chin. “It’s neither. I’m just a girl who’s about to walk back into that gym and forget you exist.”
His hand hit the wall beside my head hard enough to make me flinch.
The other braced near my hip, not touching, only closing off the last of the space. Cold pressed at every exposed inch of me.
“You won’t be forgetting me,” he whispered.
His mouth hovered near my ear, voice low enough to feel.
“Drop the act, October. You were sent. What does he want? Why is your father back in Mapleton?”
The accusation hit like a shove.
“Sent?” I let out a sharp, disbelieving laugh. “Are you serious? Nobody sent me. I don’t know what my dad wants with this town, and I don’t care. I told you—I’m nothing like him.”
Something in his expression shifted. Not softness. But the smug certainty cracked. He looked at me again—really looked—as if he’d stopped talking to my last name and started listening to the rest of me.
“No,” he said slowly. “I suppose you’re not.”
His gaze moved over my face as if rearranging every conclusion he had made in the last five minutes.
“That’s interesting.”
I hated how much those two words got under my skin.
“Well, you’d know all about interesting,” I shot back. “Since you’re the one who’s been following me all morning.”
A low breath of laughter brushed my cheek.
“If I had been following you, you wouldn’t have seen me.”
He leaned in enough to let the cold of him sink through my cardigan and into my bones.
“You would have only felt the temperature drop.”
“I wasn’t following you.”
“And I wasn’t born yesterday.”
His hand flexed against the wall beside my head.
“Some people really need to learn to leave the dark alone before it decides to keep them.”
I planted both palms against his chest and shoved.
He gave way too easily, stepping back with unnerving grace, as if he had allowed it. Air rushed into my lungs, carrying the scent of woodsmoke and rain off his jacket.
“Then it can take a number,” I snapped, smoothing my cardigan with hands that would not stop shaking. “I didn’t choose to be an October, and I definitely didn’t choose to be cornered in a parking lot by some guy who thinks threats count as conversation.”
He reached out and caught a loose strand of my hair between two elegant fingers.
The touch hit like static.
“You’ve got teeth,” he said, voice low.
Then his hand dropped.
“Keep them to yourself.”
The faint softness vanished.
“Because if you so much as breathe a word of Winter Quarters to anyone, you won’t have to worry about who hears you.”
His eyes locked onto mine, silver and flat.
“You’ll have to worry about me.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but he cut me off with a look.
“You’re a lighthouse in a blackout, October. Do the math before you break yourself.”
He stepped back then.
“And if you’ve got any survival instinct left in that blood of yours,” he added, already turning toward the gym, “go home and stay there.”
The doors slammed behind him.
I stayed where I was, falling back against the gym wall, brick scraping through my cardigan. My heart climbed out of my throat, but the cold remained—a phantom weight on my skin where he had hovered, like frostbite that refused to thaw.
My bottom lip trembled, and I bit down hard. The sharp sting was the only thing keeping the frustrated tears from spilling over.
I would not cry.
Not over a guy who looked at me and saw a question mark instead of a person.
The wind bit at my cheeks. Sunlight assaulted my skin, pale and indifferent. A burst of laughter erupted from the courtyard—too loud, too bright, too human.
I drifted back down the hall, mind a step behind my feet.
“Hey—”
I blinked, the gym hallway snapping back into focus.
Penny was leaning against my locker, hair sticking up in chaotic tufts. She looked far too settled in her maroon gym clothes, a half-eaten granola bar paused on its way to her mouth.
She tapped the locker beside my head, knuckles making a soft, thoughtful sound.
“You were gone a long time. Find what you were looking for?”
“Sorry.” My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. “I must have gotten turned around.”
“Are you okay?” She tilted her head, eyes narrowing with that best-friend intuition I did not want to face.
I forced a breath—shaky, but passable. “Maybe I’m hungry?”
“Maybe?” Penny raised an eyebrow. “You skipped lunch, Maddie. Your blood sugar is probably in the basement.”
Without missing a beat, she plunged into the black hole of her purse, bypassed hair ties and crumpled receipts, then pressed a fresh granola bar into my palm.
“Here. Eat. Julian was looking for you, by the way. Probably wants to rope you into that project for Baker’s class.”
“Great,” I muttered, tearing open the wrapper with trembling fingers.
The first bite was tasteless, dry and chalky on my tongue, but I welcomed it. It was a solid weight in my stomach to anchor me to the earth.
Penny straightened, brushing crumbs off her shirt. “C’mon. If we’re late, Coach Nelson will have our heads.”
I shoved the rest of the bar into my mouth and followed her. But as we turned toward the gym, I felt like a tethered kite. My body was moving toward fifth period, but the rest of me was still outside, pinned against the brick in Heaton’s shadow.
Through the double doors, the gym erupted into life—sneakers squealing, basketballs thudding, the air heavy with floor cleaner.
I changed in a blur of dented metal lockers and aerosol deodorant. By the time I stepped onto the glossy court, Coach Nelson’s whistle cracked through the air.
“Move it, ladies!”
Beside me, Penny’s shoulders tensed.
“Try not to die,” she whispered.
We ran laps until my legs moved on autopilot.
Shuttle runs followed, each sprint carving fire into my lungs. I welcomed the burn. Leaned into it. Anything to drown out the static prickling under my skin.
No Heaton. No shadows.
No silver eyes tracking me from the bleachers.
Just sweat stinging my eyes and the hard slam of my heart against my ribs.
When the final whistle blew, it sounded like a small mercy.
“Hit the showers!”
I dressed in silence afterward, muscles saturated with exhaustion. The locker room was a haze of steam and blow dryers, but the unease from the morning hadn’t faded. It had only sunk deeper—buried under the motion, waiting for me to slow down.
I found Penny by the exit, cheeks flushed and damp hair plastered to her temples. She exhaled a long, shaky breath before shooting me a double finger-gun.
“Okay, I’m officially impressed. Next field day, you’re on my team. No arguments.”
I managed a smirk. “Guess I’ll start training now.”
“Good. You’ll need it.”
She drifted backward into the current of students filling the hall.
“Senior lot. Last bell. If you’re late, I’m leaving you to fend for yourself with the freshmen!”
I tossed her a lazy salute as she vanished.
By the time I pushed through the greenhouse doors for last period, the atmosphere had shifted.
Warm, humid air wrapped around me like a damp blanket, heavy with the scent of soil and crushed ferns.
Sunlight spilled through the glass ceiling in broken ribbons, pooling across the stone floor and terracotta planters.
Somewhere deep in the layered green, water dripped in a slow, patient rhythm.
Mrs. Ellwood stood at the front, wiry as the stems she tended. Fine lines etched her skin, and the wide-brimmed hat perched on her head felt less like an accessory than an extension of her person.
“Welcome to Environmental Science,” she said, voice low and even. She didn’t wait for the chatter to die down before pulling a clipboard from beneath her arm. “Let’s start with attendance.”
She moved through the list, names falling into a steady cadence until she hit the H’s.
“Heaton?”
The silence that followed was deafening.
I shouldn’t have looked.
I told myself not to look.
But my eyes drifted to the back stool anyway, searching for the silver-eyed lunatic who had warned me to disappear.
The seat was empty.
It sat in the shadows like an open wound, vacant and waiting.
I looked away fast, but the image remained, pressed into the back of my eyelids like a dead flower in a book.
The rest of the class passed in a blur. I took meaningless notes, my brain a battlefield of white noise and frost-edged static.
The last bell tore through the quiet, snapping the room—and me—back to the present.
Outside, the parking lot was a chaotic blend of groaning buses and curling exhaust. Penny waited in the senior lot, leaning against the hood of her sedan with her sunglasses low on her nose.
I had barely reached for the passenger door when Sasha’s crew swept past. Sasha didn’t speak, but her sideways glance was sugar on the surface and something sour underneath.
“Ignore her,” Penny muttered as I slid into the seat. The car smelled of hazelnut coffee from her travel mug and the papery scent of a library book warming on the dash. “She’s just mad you have better taste in company.”
Penny shifted into drive, tires humming against the pavement.
“So. Are you going to tell me why you were so spaced out all day, or should I start a betting pool?”
“I wasn’t—”
“Uh-huh.”
Her grin was sharp, even as her eyes stayed on the road.
She filled the silence with gossip about Sasha’s older sister and plans that had imploded when their dad died, but I was only half-listening.
I watched Mapleton blur past: the shuttered diner, the peeling murals, sunlight spilling gold across the valley. The air cooled as the houses thinned, shadows of the trees stretching out to greet us.
Then the October Estate emerged—an ancient crown of brick and gables half-swallowed by the pines.
But it wasn’t the house that made my stomach drop.
A forest-green station wagon sat crooked in the driveway, paint faded to a mossy matte. A small white tag still fluttered against the window—a practical, sturdy relic plucked straight from a yard sale or police auction.
I groaned, burying my face in my hands.
“Please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
Penny pulled to a stop, lips twitching with suppressed laughter.
“Oh no. He didn’t.”
“He did,” I whispered, the weight of the day crashing down on me.
My dad’s idea of a starter car.
The one Ford had warned me about.
Between the mysterious new guy behind the gym wall and the grease monkey in my driveway, my survival instincts finally agreed on one thing:
It was going to be a very long year.