LOVE ME WHILE THEY BURY THE TRUTH

THE DEVIL KNOCKS POLITELY

He knocked exactly when he said he would.

Ten minutes. Not nine. Not eleven. Ten, like he’d been standing outside my door counting down just to prove a point about the kind of man he was.

I didn’t move from my desk chair immediately. I let him knock twice because walking straight to that door felt like losing something I hadn’t agreed to give up yet. Then I crossed the room, wrapped my hand around the cold metal handle, and opened it.

Collins Waverly stood in my doorway with rain on his shoulders and absolutely nothing on his face.

Not concern nor urgency. Not the expression of a boy who had just watched someone get carried out of a building in a body bag two hours ago. He looked the way a person looked when they had trained themselves so thoroughly to feel nothing publicly that the training had become the face itself.

He was taller up close. That was the first thing. The second was that his eyes were darker than I’d clocked from four rows back in a lecture hall. Something in between that the corridor light couldn’t fully decide on.

“You answered,” he said.

“You called.”

“A lot of people wouldn’t have picked up.”

“I’m not a lot of people,” I said. “What do you want, Collins?”

Something moved behind his eyes at the sound of his name in my mouth. Quick, gone before I could read it. He glanced once down the empty corridor, then back at me.

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

He absorbed that without blinking. “Then we talk here.”

“We talk here,” I agreed, and crossed my arms and waited.

He watched me with a gaze that held no answers. That I suspected he’d been perfecting since before either of us could legally drive. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and held up his phone.

The forum post was already pulled up on his screen. The photograph. Two figures. My coat. His hair. The timestamp reading 11:41 PM like a signed confession.

“That goes viral by morning,” he said, “and we are both standing in front of Dean Hargrove by noon answering questions neither of us wants to answer.”

“I wasn’t in his room.”

“I know.”

“Then why does it look like…”

“Because someone needed it to look like that.” He said it quietly, without drama, like a person stating the weather. “Think about it, Sonia. That photo was taken from the third floor east window of Pembrook annex. Nobody is standing at a third floor window at 11:41 PM with a camera ready unless they already knew something was going to happen in that building.”

The cold that had been spreading through my chest since I read the alert crystallized into something sharper.

I had thought the same thing. I just hadn’t wanted to be the first one to say it out loud because saying it out loud made it real in a way I wasn’t ready for yet.

“You’re saying Wesley’s death wasn’t spontaneous,” I said.

“I’m saying that photograph was not.”

“Those are two different statements.”

“Yes,” Collins said. “They are.”

We looked at each other across the threshold of my doorway and the corridor was so quiet I could hear the rain picking up outside the window at the far end of the hall, drumming against old stone the way rain always did at Crestfield, insistently, like it had somewhere to be and the building was simply in the way.

“How do you know my name?” I asked. “My number.”

“Crestfield isn’t as large as it feels.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.” He pocketed the phone. “I know who you are, Sonia Reynard. I know why you’re here. And I know that whatever you were building, whatever quiet thing you’ve been doing for the past three weeks, Wesley Anderson’s death just buried it under six feet of police tape.”

Every single hair on my arms stood up.

I kept my face completely smooth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do.” He said not aggressively nor threateningly. Just certain, the way only someone who had already done the research spoke. “You’ve been watching him. Tuesday seminars. Friday lunches. You sat in the east section of the upper dining room every Friday for three weeks because it gave you sightlines to his usual table without putting you in his direct eyeline.”

My mouth had gone dry.

“You’re very good,” Collins continued, almost conversationally. “Most people wouldn’t have noticed. I’m not most people either.”

“Why were you watching me watch him?”

He was quiet for exactly two seconds. “Because I was watching him too.”

The corridor felt narrower suddenly. The overhead light buzzed once, soft and irrelevant, and I became acutely aware of how alone we were in this hallway, how late it was, how much this boy apparently knew about me, and how very little I knew about him beyond a name in a cipher and a family name carved in stone.

“What do you want?” I asked again. Different weight this time.

“The same thing you want,” he said. “To not spend the next three months being investigated for a murder neither of us committed.” He paused. “And to find out who actually did it.”

“You expect me to believe that.”

“I expect you to be smart enough to recognize that right now, tonight, the only person at Crestfield whose interests perfectly align with yours is standing in your doorway.” He tilted his head slightly. “The question isn’t whether you trust me, Sonia. You don’t. That’s fine. The question is whether you’re intelligent enough to use me anyway.”

I hated that it landed. I genuinely hated it. The clean logic of it, the way he’d stripped the argument down to its bare bones and presented it without decoration because he’d known decoration wouldn’t work on me.

He had studied me. That realization arrived with a quiet violence.

Collins Waverly had studied me the way I’d been studying Wesley Anderson, and I hadn’t felt it once.

“What exactly are you proposing?” I said.

“We give each other an alibi.”

“We barely know each other.”

“Which is why it has to start tonight.” He glanced down the corridor again. Brief, automatic, the habit of someone permanently aware of their surroundings. “By tomorrow morning the forum post will have names attached to it. By tomorrow afternoon people will be talking. If we get ahead of it, if there is already a version of events that places us together tonight for a reason that has nothing to do with Wesley Anderson’s room, then the narrative shifts before it calcifies.”

“You want us to fake a relationship,” I said flatly.

“I want us to survive the week,” he said. “The relationship is the mechanism.”

“And after the investigation closes?”

“We go back to being strangers.” Something almost imperceptible crossed his face. “You get what you came here for. I get what I need. Nobody else gets buried.”

The rain was loud now against the far window. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed and we both went still until the footsteps faded and the corridor returned to its held-breath silence.

“You said nobody else gets buried,” I said slowly. “Who got buried first?”

His jaw didn’t clench neither did his expression c***k. The nature of his stillness changed, barely, the way a room changed when the temperature dropped one degree, noticeable only to someone already paying very close attention.

“That,” Collins said, “is a conversation for when you’ve said yes.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then by noon tomorrow you’re explaining to Dean Hargrove why you were photographed leaving a dead boy’s building, and whatever you’ve spent three weeks building gets dismantled before you find a single thing worth keeping.” He straightened. “And I walk away and figure out another arrangement.”

“You’d really walk away.”

“I’d have no reason to stay.”

It was the honesty of it that got me. The flat, clean truth of two people standing on the same burning ledge looking at the same drop. He wasn’t asking me to trust him. He wasn’t even asking me to like him. He was asking me to be practical in a situation where sentiment was a luxury neither of us could currently afford.

Maurice had taught me that. Long before Collins Waverly ever appeared in my doorway. Sonia, he used to say, emotion is information, not instruction. Don’t let it drive.

“If I find out you had anything to do with Maurice…” I stopped. My voice had done made a sound I hadn’t authorized. I pulled it back flat. “If I find anything that connects you to my brother’s death, I will burn every single thing you care about to the ground and I will feel nothing doing it. Do you understand me?”

Collins looked at me for a long time after that. Really looked not the cataloguing glance from across the courtyard. His expression was quieter and considerably more dangerous.

“Maurice Reynard,” he said softly. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Answer the question.”

“I understand you,” he said. And then, after a beat that carried more weight than anything else he’d said tonight: “I’m sorry about your brother.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. I hadn’t prepared for that. Anger I could work with. Deflection I could dismantle. But three quiet words delivered without pretense landed somewhere I hadn’t left unguarded and I felt it like a splinter. Small, deep, already under the skin before I realized it had broken through.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t be human at me right now. It won’t work.”

A feeling that was almost tangible, a real expression ghosted across his face and disappeared. “Noted.”

He stepped back from the doorway. One step, enough to give me breathing room and still hold the conversation in place.

“I need an answer tonight, Sonia.”

I looked at this boy. This unreadable, too-composed, dangerously informed boy who had his name in my dead brother’s private files and rain drying on his collar and the audacity to show up at my door at midnight with a proposition that made every rational part of me scream to slam the door and call nobody and figure this out alone the way I always figured everything out alone.

I thought about the forum post. The photograph. The timestamp. The third floor window and whoever had been standing at it with a camera already raised.

I thought about fourteen months of building something that had just been buried under Wesley Anderson’s body.

I thought about Maurice.

“If you lie to me once,” I said, “we’re done.”

Collins held my gaze. “Once is all it takes.”

“Then we have an understanding.”

I stepped back from the doorway. Not an invitation exactly, more like a door left ajar, which was as much as I had to give and he seemed to know it.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Dining hall. Eight o’clock. Sit with me.”

“People will talk.”

“That,” Collins said, and for the first time all night there was a c***k in his voice I couldn’t immediately categorize, low and quiet and threading underneath everything else like a current, “is entirely the point.”

He turned and walked down the corridor without looking back. The sound of his footsteps on old hardwood fading into the dark end of the hallway until there was nothing left of him but rain on my doorstep and the echo of my brother’s name in a voice I hadn’t expected to say it with any kind of weight.

I closed the door.

Leaned my back against it.

My hands were not shaking. I made sure of that. I pressed them flat against the wood behind me until they were steady and certain and mine again.

Then I walked back to my desk, opened Maurice’s files, and typed three words into the CW folder that I had not been able to type before tonight.

He knows something.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I added five more.

So do I. Find it.