LOVE ME WHILE THEY BURY THE TRUTH

Everyone at Crestfield had a story about how they got in. Hilda got in on a violin scholarship. The girl two doors down from me in Pembrook Hall got in because her grandfather donated an entire science wing back in 1987. The boy across the courtyard got in because his father made one phone call to the right person over the right dinner, and that was simply how things worked at places like this quietly, expensively, without leaving fingerprints. Me? I got in because I was the best applicant they’d seen from a public school in four years. Because the financial aid office took one look at my file and decided I was exactly the kind of diversity success story Crestfield’s glossy brochure had been missing. A girl from Sallow Creek. Straight A’s. Dead brother. Nothing left to lose. They didn’t know about that last part. The nothing left to lose. That was mine. The one thing I hadn’t put on any application. “You’re doing it again,” Hilda said. She dropped into the seat beside me four minutes into Professor Aldridge’s Criminal Law lecture, coffee in each hand, violin case bumping the back of my chair as she settled. Six weeks into the semester and she’d already memorized exactly how I took mine. Black, no sugar, temperature bordering on dangerous. I took it without looking up. “Doing what?” “The thing where your body shows up but the rest of you goes somewhere no one’s allowed to follow.” “I’m taking notes.” “Sonia. You’ve written the same line three times.” I looked down at my notebook. She wasn’t wrong. Burden of proof. Burden of proof. Burden of proof. Same handwriting, same pressure on the pen, like my hand had been running on muscle memory while my mind ran its usual parallel track. Maurice, the USB drive, the sixteen names catalogued across six weeks, the seven I’d already quietly crossed off. I drew a slow line through two more. “I’m fine,” I said. Hilda wrapped both hands around her cup and said absolutely nothing, which from her meant more than most people’s lengthy speeches. She had this quality of knowing precisely when to push and precisely when to leave a door cracked open and simply wait beside it. It was either the best thing about her or the most unsettling. I still hadn’t decided. The lecture hall door opened. The room changed before I understood why. The collective adjustment, every conversation dropping half a register, every spine finding itself. I looked up from my notebook. Collins Waverly walked in like the room had been waiting for him and he found that mildly inconvenient. I knew who he was before I ever set foot on this campus. Knowing who Collins Waverly was required zero effort at Crestfield. His family name was carved into the stone facade of the academic center on the north side of campus. His grandfather funded the original build. His father bankrolled the renovation after the structural issues three years back. He was nineteen, second year, and the kind of person institutions like this one produced with an almost mechanical consistency, beautiful in a way that made people uncomfortable, impossible to read, trailing a reputation so layered with rumor and carefully maintained reverence that whatever the actual truth of him was had been buried somewhere underneath years ago. He moved down the row with a quiet economy of motion that suggested he had never once been in a real hurry and wasn’t planning to start now. He sat four rows ahead. Opened a single notebook. Looked at no one. I looked back at my own page. Burden of proof, I had written. The obligation rests entirely with the party making the claim. I had circled it without noticing. His name appeared twice in Maurice’s files. Not connected to anything explicit. Just present, the way a shadow was present, attached to something without being the thing itself. Two appearances in a cipher my brother had invented at fourteen and used only when he was genuinely afraid of something. People who heard Maurice’s story, the version Crestfield quietly released, the one that used words like anxiety and mental health crisis and a tragedy the university takes deeply seriously, pictured a boy who couldn’t handle pressure. They pictured someone fragile. My brother kept a journal in a code nobody else could break. He photographed things that unsettled him. He flagged documents with colored tabs and kept printed backups in a fireproof box under his bed. Three weeks before he died, he mailed me a USB drive and a handwritten note with one instruction. If something happens, start with Wesley Anderson. I had told nobody about that note. Not my mother. Not the investigators who closed the case in eleven days. Not Hilda, who was the only person at Crestfield I’d allowed past the outermost perimeter of myself. Wesley Anderson was a third year, pre-law student. His father sat on Crestfield’s alumni donor board. He smiled in photographs the way people did when smiling had been professionally coached into them. Wide enough to read as genuine, never quite reaching the eyes. He had lived two floors above Maurice in Whitmore Hall the semester my brother died. I had been watching him for three weeks. His 8am runs. His Tuesday seminars. His Friday lunches in the upper dining room. I was building something from the patience that only a kind of grief could manufacture. The kind that had nowhere else to go. Fourteen months of building something. “Don’t look immediately,” Hilda said, outside Dalton Hall after the lecture ended, “but Collins Waverly is looking at you.” I looked immediately. He was standing near the entrance to the humanities building with Frederick Ashton. Broad across the shoulders, old Crestfield money, Collins’s permanent orbit since what appeared to be birth. Frederick had this quality of silence that felt less like a personality trait and more like active surveillance. Collins was mid-sentence when his eyes moved across the courtyard and located mine with a precision that had nothing accidental about it. He didn’t look away. Neither did I. Looking away first was a form of information and I was not handing that out without reason. Four seconds. Five. His facial expression changed and then he looked back at Frederick like I had been a minor detail he’d already catalogued and set aside. “That,” Hilda said carefully, “was not nothing.” “It was nothing.” “Collins Waverly does not look at people like that, Sonia.” “Like what exactly?” “Like he’s already made a decision about them.” She fell into step beside me, dropping her voice. “I’ve been at this school six weeks and I have never once seen him look at anyone the way he just looked at you.” I pulled my coat tighter and kept moving. The fog had come down heavy since morning, turning the campus into something watercolor and indistinct, and I had seventeen things to think about that mattered more than eye contact from a boy with his name on a building. But I filed it anyway. Collins Waverly. Eye contact. Deliberate. Reason unknown. Note: his name is in Maurice’s files. I added it to the list and kept walking. The alert came at 11:47 that night. I was at my desk in my single room in Pembrook Hall, the USB drive plugged in, Maurice’s files spread open across two windows. The sub-folder I’d labeled CW sat on the left side of the screen, still thin, still the thing that kept me awake longer than everything else combined, two entries and nothing yet to attach them to. My phone lit up. Crestfield University Security. 11:44 PM. Student found unresponsive in Whitmore Hall, Room 214. Campus security and emergency services responding. All students advised to remain in residential buildings until further notice. I read it once. Read it again. Room 214. Whitmore Hall. Wesley Anderson’s room. The coffee at my elbow went cold without me touching it. I sat completely still in the way that wasn’t calm. The way that was the body’s very last defense before something broke through. Three weeks. I had been precisely three weeks from having something real, something that could finally split open the silence that had swallowed my brother’s death like it was nothing, like he was nothing, and now. My phone buzzed. Hilda. Student forum. Right now. Sonia. Please. The post had been live for six minutes. Nearly two hundred interactions already climbing. A photograph shot from a residential window. Grainy, timestamped 11:41 PM, two figures exiting Whitmore Hall through the east side door, the fog dissolving their edges into suggestion. One line of text below the image. Anyone recognize these two? I recognized one immediately. The coat, camel-colored, slightly oversized, hanging past my hips the way it always did. Maurice had given it to me the winter before he died and I had not been able to stop wearing it since September, like some stubborn part of me believed it still held something of him inside the fabric. The second figure was taller. Dark-haired. Moving with the same quiet economy I had watched cross a lecture hall only that morning. Collins Waverly. My hands went absolutely still on the keyboard. Wesley Anderson was dead. The one person my dead brother had pointed me toward with his last coherent act was gone, and I was photographed outside his building, and the boy whose name lived in Maurice’s files like an unfinished sentence was standing right beside me in the image. I closed the laptop. Then opened it. Read the post a third time like the words might rearrange themselves into something less catastrophic. My phone rang. Unknown number. It rang once. Twice. Four full cycles while I sat there with my brother’s cipher open on the screen and something cold spreading through my chest that had nothing to do with the October temperature. I picked up. “Sonia Reynard.” The voice was low and completely unhurried. The voice of someone who had mapped the entire conversation before dialing. “Don’t speak to anyone tonight. Not campus security. Not your roommate. Not a single person.” A silence that felt like a held breath. “I’ll be at your door in ten minutes.” The line cut dead. I sat in the dark with the screen light cutting across my hands and Wesley Anderson’s name turning to ice somewhere in my throat and every rational thought I had lining itself up and pointing at one unavoidable conclusion. Collins Waverly had my number. Collins Waverly knew my name. And Collins Waverly, whose name sat in my murdered brother’s private files like a warning I hadn’t finished reading yet, was coming to my door. Ten minutes. Outside, the fog had consumed every lamppost on the courtyard path. Every single one. Like Crestfield itself had decided to stop pretending the dark wasn’t there. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I waited.