Chapter Nine
747 Words
Vancouver welcomed her back with its usual indifference, gray skies, quiet streets, and the steady rhythm of rain against glass.
Brianna had always liked the sound of rain. It drowned out everything else.
Back at St. John’s, the world seemed smaller again. Her classmates greeted her with the same smiles, the same meaningless chatter. She slipped easily into her role, the composed, witty girl who never said too much but always said it well.
But beneath that calm surface, something inside her was shifting.
She still spoke to Jenny almost every day. The messages came at odd hours, photos of the farm, updates about her classes, little stories about the community programs she was helping with. On paper, everything looked unchanged.
Yet every message now carried a strange edge.
Jenny was warmer, softer. There was something in her words, in the quiet pauses between sentences. It wasn’t what she said, it was what she didn’t.
And Brianna noticed. She always noticed.
One rainy afternoon, while scrolling through her phone between classes, she saw a tag, a repost of an article about Jordan Saavedra’s latest column.
Curiosity was a dangerous thing, and she’d never learned to control it.
She clicked through the tags, the mentions, until she found his official profile. It was clean, professional, exactly what she expected, full of sharp captions, photos of rural landscapes, and social commentaries that made people call him “visionary.”
But buried under his tagged photos was something else.
A private account. The handle was simple. Minimal. His initials, a number. @j.saav96
It wasn’t verified, and it had barely a hundred followers. But she recognized him instantly, a photo of him sitting by a window, half-lit by the sun.
Her pulse quickened as she hit “Follow.”
The request stayed pending for a few hours. She kept checking, telling herself it didn’t matter. Then, sometime after dinner, her phone buzzed.
@j.saav96 accepted your follow request.
Her breath caught for a second, just a flicker, but enough.
She scrolled slowly. The posts were personal, old film photos, handwritten notes, pieces of moments he hadn’t shown the world. He wasn’t performing here. He was just him.
And that, somehow, made her angrier.
Because it wasn’t fair that Jenny had this version of him, the quiet, unguarded one.
She told herself she was only looking. That it was curiosity, not intrusion. But as she reached his most recent story, she stopped.
It was a photograph, taken at dusk, soft and golden. The back of a woman standing near the shoreline, hair caught in the wind. She didn’t turn toward the camera, but Brianna didn’t need to see her face.
She knew that posture. That delicate tilt of the head. That familiar white blouse Jenny always wore.
The caption read: “Some moments don’t need words.”
Her stomach turned cold.
She stared at the screen, unblinking, until the image timed out and faded away.
Her phone slipped from her hand and landed softly on the bed. For a long time, she just sat there, silent.
She didn’t cry, that wasn’t her way. She didn’t scream or break things either. She just felt something thick and ugly coil inside her chest.
Jenny hadn’t told her. Not a word.
Brianna should have felt foolish, but instead, she felt betrayed. Not just by Jenny, but by the idea that someone like him, someone she had built in her mind, could look at someone else like that.
She didn’t even know him, not really. Yet somehow, she felt as though she did. As though she had known him first.
It was irrational. And she didn’t care.
That night, she opened their message thread and stared at Jenny’s last text:
Jenny: You made it home safe?Brianna: Yeah. Just tired.Jenny: Rest well, okay?Brianna: Sure.
Brianna typed, “By the way, you look good in white,” then deleted it.
Instead, she wrote:Brianna: We should visit that beach when I come back. It looks nice.
Jenny replied with a heart emoji.
Brianna stared at it for a moment, then locked her phone.
Her reflection in the window looked almost calm, but she could feel the storm underneath.
Jenny might think she could hide things.Jordan might think he was untouchable.
But Brianna had time. And patience. And a quiet, burning will to make things right, on her terms.
She smiled faintly, a cruel, knowing curve of her lips.
They would never see her coming.
- Writer
