Beautifully deceived

CHAPTERTWO

CHAPTER TWO: The After-Party

The party started at the Hawks' team house a little after eleven, and by midnight it had swallowed most of Goldcrest's campus.

Elena hadn't planned on going. But Priya had shown up at her apartment door in heels and a dress that cost more than Elena's rent, practically vibrating with the kind of energy only free champagne and campus gossip could produce, and she'd refused to leave without her.

"Leo's fine," Priya had said, already pulling Elena's coat off its hook. "He's sixteen. He can survive one night alone with a bowl of cereal and Wi-Fi."

"That's exactly what worries me."

"One hour. I'll drive you home myself."

Elena had looked at her brother, curled on the couch with his headphones on, waved off without even glancing up from his game, and told herself an hour wouldn't hurt anything. She'd told herself a lot of things that year that turned out not to be true.

The team house was loud in a way that felt different from the arena less like a single roaring animal and more like a hundred separate conversations shouting to be heard over each other. String lights had been draped across the backyard, a DJ had set up in what used to be a garage, and somewhere in the crush of bodies, Julian Ashford was holding court without seeming to try. He didn't have to try. People orbited him the way planets orbit something with enough gravity to bend light.

Elena watched him from across the yard, half-hidden behind a cluster of Priya's sorority friends, and thought not for the first time that week that there was something almost lonely about a man who could fill a room without saying a word.

She didn't approach him. She had no reason to. He was hockey captain and heir to a fortune the size of a small country's GDP, and she was a scholarship kid with a brother at home and a scholarship renewal riding on a 3.7 GPA she couldn't afford to lose to a hangover. Their lives didn't have an intersection. That was the whole point of a campus like Goldcrest it let you stand in the same backyard as someone like Julian Ashford and still be a thousand miles away.

At half past midnight, her phone buzzed in her clutch.

Unknown number.

She almost didn't answer. It was loud, and she was tired, and Priya was trying to drag her toward the dance floor with the kind of insistence that came from three glasses of champagne. But something instinct, maybe, or the particular dread that lived permanently in the back of the mind of anyone who had ever been the one responsible for someone else made her step outside and pick up.

"Is this Elena Davis?"

"Yes who is this?"

"This is Saint Mercy Hospital. We're calling regarding your brother, Leo Davis. You're listed as his emergency contact."

The music kept playing behind her. The string lights kept glowing gold against the dark. And Elena Davis stood very still in the middle of a party she never should have gone to, feeling the entire night rearrange itself around four words she would remember for the rest of her life.

There's been an accident.

She didn't remember the drive to the hospital. She remembered Priya's hands on the wheel, white-knuckled, going faster than she should have. She remembered the fluorescent lights of the emergency room hallway, too bright, too clean, humming with a sound she'd never noticed hallways could make. She remembered a doctor's mouth moving and catching only fragments skateboard, head trauma, swelling, induced coma, we're monitoring words that didn't fit together into anything she could hold onto.

Leo had gone out. Just for twenty minutes, a text later confirmed, sent to a friend at 11:47 p.m.back before she gets home lol. He'd taken his board down the hill two blocks from their apartment, the one with the bad streetlight at the bottom that had been reported to the city twice and fixed zero times, and a car had come around the corner too fast, and he'd swerved, and the rest of it the rest of it was a hospital bed and a ventilator and a doctor telling Elena that the next forty-eight hours were critical, that they wouldn't know more until he woke up, if he woke up, and that she should sit down before she asked any more questions.

She didn't sit down. She stood in that hallway at two in the morning with her sixteen-year-old brother's hand in hers, IV lines taped to skin she'd once band-aided over a hundred childhood scrapes, and she thought, with a clarity that scared her: I left him alone. I went to a party for a hockey player I don't even know, and I left him alone.

It didn't matter that the accident had nothing to do with the party. Guilt has never once cared about the facts of a case.

Somewhere across town, the string lights were still glowing gold, and the music was still playing, and Julian Ashford who did not know her name yet, who had never once looked directly at her in three years of shared campus air was laughing at something a teammate said, entirely unaware that a life two miles away had just cracked in half.

He would learn her name soon enough. Everyone would.