THE CHRISTMAS LUNA SATISFYING THE ENIGMAS

Chapter 8

ALESSIA

The letter from Mia came on the twenty-second.

Logan brought it, unopened, holding it the way you hold something you suspect might be dangerous. "It came to my address," he said. "I don't know how she found it."

I opened it alone, on the balcony, because whatever was inside it, I didn't want an audience for how I received it.

It was short. Three sentences, unsigned except for a small looping M in the corner. I'm sorry. I didn't know it would go this far. I hope you find whatever you were looking for when you left.

I read it twice. I did not cry, which surprised me — I had expected to. What I felt instead was something quieter and harder to name, a kind of tired mercy that didn't erase what she'd done but made room, somewhere, for the fact that she'd been seventeen and frightened and offered money by someone far more skilled at using people than Mia had ever been at resisting it.

I folded the letter and put it in the drawer, next to the sketchbook, and did not answer it. Not yet. Some doors, I was learning, could be left ajar without needing to be walked all the way through.

The rest of the week disappeared into transformation.

Logan cut my hair on the twenty-third, the scissors sharp and businesslike in his careful hands, dark curls gathering on the kitchen tile while I told myself it was only hair. When he turned me toward the mirror, the girl looking back had my eyes and someone else's jaw, and I decided, looking at her, that I liked her. She looked like someone who had already survived the worst of it.

Aiden took over my walk with the same unglamorous precision he brought to everything — following me the length of the living room, correcting the same shoulder drop over and over with a patience that never once curdled into irritation, even on the twentieth repetition.

"You're thinking about it too hard," he said, the fifth evening of drills. "Stop performing Alex. Just be tired, the way any cadet would be tired after a full day, and let the walk follow the tiredness instead of trying to lead it."

I tried. It worked better than four days of deliberate correction had.

"How did you know that would help?"

"Because that's how you walked the night you arrived here," he said. "Exhausted, and honest about it. It was the most convincing you've been this whole week."

Ryker handled posture with almost no words at all, his hands firm and brief on my shoulders, correcting and stepping back, correcting and stepping back, until my spine remembered the shape without needing his hands to remind it. Jasper handled volume and register with theatrical despair at my early attempts and genuine delight at my later ones, and Carter ran mock interrogations across the kitchen table every evening — a professor asking my name, an administrator asking my hometown, a fellow cadet asking why I'd transferred programs midyear — until Alex George stopped feeling like a mask I was holding up and started feeling like a register I could simply drop into, the way I dropped into French when I wanted to be misunderstood by strangers on purpose.

"You're better at this than you should be," Carter said, on the last night of drills, studying me across the table with something that looked almost like concern.

"Is that bad?"

"It means you've spent three years learning how to be someone Ethan could tolerate," he said. "This isn't so different. I just wanted you to notice that before you got too good at it."

I noticed. I filed it away, the way I was learning to file most hard truths lately, and did not let it slow me down.