90 MILES TO YOU

PRIDE AND TENDER WOUNDS

Chapter Ten: Pride and Tender Wounds

Ethan did not come to school on Thursday, and when he came on Friday he looked through Maya as though she were glass.

It was a talent, she realized. He could make an entire hallway go quiet, and he could make one person disappear. He sat on the far side of Mr. Alvarez's class with his jacket zipped to the chin and his eyes on the window, and when the bell rang he was gone before she had capped her pen.

She told herself she had expected it. A boy who had spent three years building a wall did not thank the girl who watched him dismantle it in a marble hall. She had heard what she should not have heard, and he would never forgive her for it.

She told herself she didn't care. Her pride held that line all through Chemistry.

It did not survive the corridor.

"Maya Hale."

Chloe Whitmore stood in front of her locker, perfectly dressed, perfectly composed, with one friend behind her and a smile that did not reach her eyes. The friend held nothing this time. No phone. No camera. Someone had clearly been told to keep her hands to herself.

"I don't have time," Maya said.

"You'll make time." Chloe stepped closer, and her voice dropped to a low, silken edge. "I heard you visited the house on Wednesday."

"I returned a jacket."

"How thoughtful." Chloe's gaze moved over her, slow and measuring. "And by coincidence, that very afternoon, Ethan stood in his father's study and told everyone that I'm like a sister to him. Funny timing, isn't it?"

Maya's stomach dropped. "I didn't—"

"My father called me last night. Do you know what he said? That I should be grateful for a family willing to wait for me to come home." Her smile cracked, then smoothed. "Three years abroad, three years of letters, and I come back to find that he's chosen a charity case with a pen and a plan."

"He hasn't chosen anyone."

"Don't insult me." The silk went out of her voice. "You think because he carried you home in a thunderstorm that you're special? I've known him since we were five. I know how he acts when he's kind. He's always kind. It means nothing."

"Then why are you so afraid of it?"

The corridor held its breath.

Chloe's face went white, then red, and for one second Maya saw the thing underneath, raw and furious and young. Then it was gone, replaced by cold, polished contempt.

"Enjoy it while it lasts," Chloe said softly. "The Coles don't keep girls like you. They use them and they forget them. Ask Ethan what his father does with people who stop being useful."

She turned and walked away, her heels clicking, her friend scrambling behind her.

Maya stood there with her heart pounding and her fingers cold, and she did not notice Priya until a hand touched her sleeve.

"Okay," Priya said gently. "Come with me."

They ended up on the bleachers behind the gym, where the afternoon sun lay in long yellow bars across the empty benches.

Priya did not say anything for a while. She just handed over half a sandwich and waited.

"I'm fine," Maya said.

"You're furious."

"I'm fine."

"You're a person who has been holding her breath for four weeks." Priya turned to face her, her expression unusually serious. "I've watched you. You come in with your neat notes and your color-coded margins, and you never let anyone see when it hurts. The lipstick on your locker. The slides. The things they say. You just wipe it off and keep walking."

"What else am I supposed to do?"

"Tell someone. Tell me." Priya's voice wobbled. "I'm your friend, Maya. I'm not your audience."

Something in Maya's chest gave way. She put the sandwich down and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

"He won't look at me," she whispered. "I heard everything, Priya. His father. The company. He said things that no one was meant to hear, and now he can't stand the sight of me."

"Or he can't stand being seen."

Maya lowered her hands.

"Boys like that," Priya said slowly, "don't hide because they're cold. They hide because they're scared that someone will finally look closely and not like what's there." She shrugged, small and helpless. "I could be wrong. But you came here to be seen, too. You don't have to do it alone."

They sat in the golden light for a long time, and Maya let herself cry, quietly and without apology, and Priya did not say a word.

She was on the porch at ten that night, wrapped in a blanket, not reading.

Her mother was asleep. The lane lay quiet under a thin crescent moon, and the streetlight at the corner buzzed and flickered. Maya sat on the top step with her chin on her knees, thinking of a boy's hand brushing a strand of wet hair from her cheek.

A shape came out of the dark.

She knew him by the walk first. Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, each step unhurried and wary. Then the pale shine of the silver watch.

Ethan stopped at the foot of the steps, near the third stair, the one he had fixed.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She had prepared a hundred cold replies. They all evaporated.

"For what?"

"For Thursday. For Friday. For looking through you like you weren't there." His voice was hoarse. "I wanted to be someone who could pretend nothing happened. I'm not good at it."

"I noticed."

"I heard what Chloe said to you." He rubbed his jaw. "Priya told me. She cornered me by the vending machines and, I think, threatened me."

A small, unexpected laugh escaped Maya before she could stop it.

"She's very good at that," she said.

"She's terrifying." The ghost of a smile, then gone. He came up one step, and then another, and sat on the board beside her, leaving a careful foot of space. "I should have told you everything from the start. I didn't, because I thought if you knew who I was, you'd stop seeing me."

"And what did I see?"

"I don't know." He stared at his hands. "No one has looked that closely in a long time."

The silence between them was soft, not hostile. A moth beat against the porch light.

"Your watch is slow," Maya said quietly.

His fingers closed over it.

"It's been an hour slow since March. Since the clocks changed." He turned his wrist, and the old face caught the lamplight, scratched and gentle. "She always set it herself. I never changed it, because then it would be mine, and I don't want it to be mine. I want it to stay hers."

Her.

Maya did not ask. She remembered clause five, and the way his shoulders had trembled in the marble hall, and she understood that this was a gift, handed over carefully, like something that might break.

"Thank you for telling me," she said.

"It's the smallest part."

"It's a start."

He let out a long breath. When he turned to look at her, his eyes were dark and exhausted and terribly open, and for a heartbeat she thought of the rain and the inch between them.

"Maya," he said. "Tomorrow is Saturday."

"I know what day it is."

"There's a bus at five. From the old square." He swallowed. "I take it every other weekend. Nobody knows. Not my father. Not Chloe. Not even my mother, not really."

Her pulse quickened. The dawn. The mud-spattered bus. The name of the city she had left.

"I'm asking you to come with me," Ethan said. "I can't explain it. I don't know how. But I think if you see it, I won't have to say a word."

"Why me?"

He looked at her, and the answer was in his face before he spoke.

"Because you stayed," he said. "Everyone else read the rumors and left. You read the book."

The moth fell silent. Somewhere down the lane, a dog barked and was hushed.

"Five o'clock," Maya said slowly. "The bus shelter."

"Wear a coat." He rose, his fingers brushing hers as he stood, and the touch was brief and electric and not an accident. "It's a long ride, and it gets cold."

He went down the steps and down the lane, and she watched until the dark took him.

Then she went inside, set an alarm for four, and lay awake until it rang.