Would you still love me?

Chapter 4: Cracks

Dylan's POV

Madison doesn't bring it up again until we're alone in the parking lot, that's how she works, never in front of people, always after, when nobody's around to see the version of her that isn't performing for someone.

"You didn't have to take her side back there," she says. She's leaning against my truck, arms crossed, like she's already decided this conversation is happening whether I want it to or not.

"I didn't take anybody's side. You made fun of someone for doing homework, telling you that it wasn't cool isn't picking a side, It's just telling the truth.”

"I wasn't making fun of her, I was joking around."

"It didn't sound like a joke."

Her jaw tightens, for a second I think she's actually going to sit with what I said instead of finding a fast way around it. Then her face softens, the way it does when she wants a conversation to be over, she steps closer and hooks a finger through one of my belt loops.

"Are we really going to fight about Mia Carter?"

She says the name like it's already a joke to her, like the idea of me caring what happens to Mia is ridiculous on its own, I used to just let that kind of thing go but tonight it just doesn't sit right with me.

"I just think you could be nicer to people who've never done anything to you."

"I am nice." She says it like the sentence closes the whole thing. "Since when do you care this much about her?"

I don't have a good answer, or at least not one I'm ready to say out loud, so I shrug and tell her I have practice. She kisses my cheek before I go, the way she always does, and it used to mean something but now it mostly feels like punctuation at the end of an argument neither of us actually finished.

Practice runs late and by the time I get home, the house is quiet except for the TV in the den. My dad's watching a game with the sound turned down, he glances up when I walk past.

"Good practice?"

"Yeah. Fine."

"You seem off."

He doesn't look up from the TV when he says it, that's just how he asks things, half out of habit and half because he means it, It's not much but it's something.

I almost tell him, not the whole thing, just the edges of it. That something's felt wrong for months and I don't have a name for it and that the life everyone says I should be grateful for feels like a room I keep waiting to grow into and never quite do. But my dad's not really built for that kind of talk, not because he doesn't care, just because we've never learned how to have it, so I tell him I'm tired and head upstairs.

I don't do homework, I sit on my bed with my phone in my hand, scrolling through nothing in particular and at some point I end up back in the group chat from the project, nothing important, just Reyes sending a bad poster sketch, Brooke's one-word replies, and one message from Mia, short and dry, fixing a detail Reyes got wrong about the book, I read it twice, I don't know why.

My phone buzzes, It's Trevor, You good? You were weird at practice.

I type three different answers and delete all of them before settling on tired, that's all.

It's easier than trying to explain that things have felt off for a while now, and I can't point to one single thing that caused it.

Just a bunch of small things adding up, a dropped book in the hallway, a face I've apparently been noticing for a year without letting myself admit it. A girl who says almost nothing and somehow says more to me in one library session than Madison's said in a month.

I think about how Mia looked at Madison today, not scared, exactly, more like she was bracing for something she already knew was coming.

Like it wasn't even a surprise, like she built a system for surviving moments like that a long time ago, and it just runs on its own now, the same way you'd flinch from something hot without even thinking about it.

That gets to me more than anything Madison actually said,

I think about texting Mia. Something small, something like: Sorry about earlier Or Madison can be a lot.

I don't send it, though. I don't know what I'd be starting if I did, and I'm not ready to find out yet, I put my phone face-down on the nightstand and lie there in the dark, running through the day the way I do most nights now, trying to find the exact moment things started to change.

I don't find it, I never do, It's not one moment, It’s a hundred small ones stacking up quietly, and somewhere in that stack is a girl at a corner table by the library window who has no idea she's the reason I can't sleep.

Downstairs, the TV finally clicks off, and the house goes fully quiet.

I lie there a long time before sleep actually comes, thinking about how strange it is that a life everyone calls easy can feel this much like standing on thin ice.

Somewhere around midnight, I give up trying to sleep and just stare at the ceiling instead.

I think about Thursday, about sitting across from Mia at that same wobbly table again, and I don't know if I'm dreading it or waiting for it, maybe both. Maybe that's the part that scares me most, not knowing which one it is.