I spent Sunday night drafting the message seventeen times. I was going to tell Kai but I couldn't.
Every version started the same way “ There's something I need to tell you”and ended the same way: deleted. Because there was no version of this that didn't also include the night I sat in my bedroom and opened a file about his father's gambling debt, verified it, and sent it to a stranger's locker for fifty dollars. There was no version that skipped the part where I delivered the note that made him flinch in the darkroom and never told him I was the one who put it in his hands.
I closed my laptop at midnight. I didn't sleep after that.
Monday arrived gray and cold, the kind of November morning that felt like a warning. I was at my locker by seven-fifteen, earlier than usual, because Jules
