LOVE ME WHILE THEY BURY THE TRUTH

SIT WITH ME LIKE YOU MEAN IT

I didn’t sleep.

Not even close. I lay on top of my covers fully dressed until 3am, staring at the ceiling with Maurice’s USB drive warm in my closed fist, running the same loop over and over until it stopped feeling like panic and started feeling like strategy.

Wesley Anderson was dead.

Collins Waverly knew my name, my number, and exactly which table I’d been sitting at every Friday for three weeks.

And in seven hours I was supposed to walk into the dining hall and sit beside him like we were something to each other.

I got up at 5am, showered, and stood in front of my small mirror for longer than I usually allowed myself. I needed to know what people would see when they looked at us together. Whether it would read as believable. Whether I looked like a girl who could plausibly have fallen into Collins Waverly’s orbit, or whether I looked like exactly what I was. Someone operating inside a borrowed skin, holding everything together with fourteen months of controlled fury and very little sleep.

I looked tired. Good. Tired was human. Tired didn’t raise questions.

I put on the camel coat.

Hilda was at my door by 7:15, which told me she hadn’t slept much either.

“Talk to me,” she said, the second I opened it. No coffee this time. Both hands free, which from Hilda meant this was serious.

“Good morning to you too.”

“Sonia.” She stepped inside without being invited, which she’d stopped asking permission for around week three. “The forum post has four thousand interactions. Someone tagged your coat in the comments. People are saying…” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. “People are saying things.”

“What kind of things?” I asked.

“That you and Collins Waverly were together last night . And that Wesley Anderson dying the same night is…” She exhaled. “They’re connecting things that don’t connect.”

“Let them talk.”

She stared at me. “Let them…” She stopped again, and I watched her do the thing she did when she was genuinely frightened but didn’t want to weaponize it. Swallow it, reshape it into something she could use without it using her. “Are you safe?”

The question hit differently than I expected. Not the content of it, the texture. The way she asked it like my safety was a thing she had already decided to be personally responsible for whether I liked it or not.

“I’m fine, Hilda.”

“You’re never fine when you say you’re fine.”

“I need you to trust me right now.”

“I do trust you. That’s not what I’m asking.” She crossed her arms. “I’m asking if someone is going to try to hurt you.”

I looked at my best friend. The only real thing I’d allowed myself at Crestfield, and I made the calculation I’d been making since 3am. How much to give. How much to protect her from. Where the line was between keeping her safe and keeping her so far outside the truth that I was essentially lying to her face.

“Not if I’m careful,” I said finally.

It wasn’t enough and we both knew it. But she nodded, slow and unhappy, and let it sit.

“I have to be somewhere at eight,” I said.

“Where?”

I pulled the coat straight in the mirror. “Dining hall.”

Collins was already there.

He was sitting at the center table. He wasn’t at the edges nor a a quiet corner where two people could talk without being observed. He was at the center, under the high vaulted ceiling of the upper dining hall, where the morning light came through the tall windows and fell across everything like a spotlight. Two coffees on the table. One on his side, one across from him.

He had ordered for me.

I didn’t know how I felt about that.

I crossed the dining hall the way I crossed every room, without hesitation, because hesitation was visible and visible was dangerous. I was aware of the eyes before I was halfway across the floor. Not everyone, but enough heads lifting from breakfast plates, conversations dropping a note, the social static of a room recalibrating around something unexpected.

Sonia Reynard walking toward Collins Waverly’s table.

I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.

“You came,” he said.

“I said I would.”

“People say a lot of things at midnight.” He slid the coffee across. “You take it black.”

“You already knew that.”

“I did.” No apology in it. Just fact, delivered clean.

I wrapped both hands around the cup and looked at him in the full honest light of morning for the first time. No corridor shadows, no rain, no the-world-is-ending adrenaline distorting the image. Just Collins Waverly at a breakfast table looking like he’d slept eight hours and ironed his shirt, which I deeply resented.

“You look terrible,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

“I know. I still don’t need your commentary on my face.” I took a slow sip of coffee. “What’s the plan? Precisely. Walk me through exactly what today looks like.”

He leaned back in his chair with an ease that was either genuine or the most convincing performance I’d ever watched up close, and I genuinely could not tell which.

“We eat breakfast,” he said. “We talk. Not about anything important, this room has ears in every corner and at least three people have looked at us in the last two minutes. We look like two people who have been meeting like this for long enough that it’s comfortable.”

“It’s not comfortable.”

“No,” he said. “But it needs to look like it is.” His eyes moved briefly across the room and back. “Frederick is at the table by the window. Don’t look. He’s going to tell people by noon that we’ve been seeing each other quietly for three weeks. That we kept it private because…” He paused.

“Because why?” I interrupted.

“Because you asked me to. Because you’re a scholarship student and the attention makes you uncomfortable.” He said it without cruelty. “People will believe that faster than any other version.”

The accuracy of it stung in a way I didn’t show. “You’ve thought about this.”

“I’ve been thinking about this since 11:43 last night.”

“Two minutes after the alert.”

“Yes.”

I set the cup down. “Collins. Why were you in Whitmore Hall?”

He looked at me steadily. “Why were you?”

“I asked first.”

“And I’ll answer,” he said, “when I’m certain this table isn’t being watched by someone who isn’t just curious about who I’m having breakfast with.” He picked up his own cup. “Drink your coffee, Sonia. Tell me something true about yourself.”

“Excuse me?”

“Something real. People watching us need to see a conversation, not a negotiation. So tell me something. Anything.” His eyes held mine across the table. “Make me look like someone worth talking to.”

I stared at him for a long moment. Then I picked up my cup, leaned back in my chair, and made myself breathe like I wasn’t running calculations behind every word.

“I haven’t slept a full night since I was seventeen,” I said.

His facial expression changed. Real this time, not the curated neutrality from my doorway. “Why seventeen?”

I let a beat pass. Not long enough to be overblown. Just long enough to be honest. “That’s the year everything changed.”

He didn’t push. Didn’t pry it open the way most people would have, couldn’t resist doing. He only nodded once, like he understood that some years did that. Rewrote everything that came after them and left it exactly where I’d put it.

“Your turn,” I said.

“I haven’t been home in eight months,” he said.

“Why?”

“Same reason.” His eyes didn’t leave mine. “Everything changed.”

We sat with that for a moment. Two people at a breakfast table full of things neither of us was ready to say, building something out of the space between the words instead.

Across the room I heard someone say his name. Then mine. Then came a silence of its own that meant the sentence had been completed in a whisper.

It was working. I hated that it was working.

Frederick found me alone after.

Collins had left first. Deliberate, I understood, so that I walked out of the dining hall independently and it didn’t read as him escorting me anywhere. I was at the bottom of the Dalton Hall steps adjusting my bag strap when Frederick Ashton materialized beside me with the sudden quietness of someone who had spent years practicing appearing without announcement.

He was built wide through the shoulders, not quite as tall as Collins, with a face that would have been friendly in another pattern. In this one it was simply watchful.

“Sonia Reynard,” he said.

“Frederick Ashton,” I said back, because I wanted him to know immediately that I had done my reading.

He almost smiled. “He said you were sharp.”

“What else did he say?”

“That you’re going to be a problem.” He fell into step beside me without asking whether I wanted company. “He meant it as a compliment. Mostly.”

“What do you want, Frederick?”

“To give you some friendly advice.” He kept his voice easy, conversational, the tone of someone discussing the weather. “Collins is complicated. The people who’ve underestimated that have not had a great time.”

“Is that a warning?”

“It’s context.” He glanced sideways at me. “He doesn’t do things without a reason. Including this.”

“I know that.”

“Do you know what the reason is?”

I stopped walking. Turned to look at him straight on, because Frederick Ashton had chosen to come find me and I wanted him to feel the full force of my attention. “Do you?”

He held my gaze for three seconds. Four. Then his expression settled into a decision.

“Wesley Anderson didn’t die accidentally,” he said quietly. “And it isn’t the first time someone at Crestfield has died in a way that got cleaned up before anyone could look too closely.”

The ground didn’t move. It just felt like it did.

“How long have you known that?” I said.

“Long enough.” He glanced across the courtyard toward the humanities building. “Long enough that when Collins told me last night that Sonia Reynard was in that photograph, I knew exactly who you were. Your brother was…” He stopped.

“Finish that sentence,” I said. My voice came out lower than I intended.

Frederick looked at me with an that wasn’t pity exactly, closer to recognition. The look of someone who had been carrying a force they hadn’t chosen and had learned to recognize it on other people.

“Your brother was asking the right questions,” he said carefully. “Before he died.”

The morning air felt thin suddenly. I breathed through it. In. Out. Controlled and intentional and completely invisible, the way Maurice had taught me to fall apart quietly, so nobody could use it against you.

“What questions?” I said.

“That,” Frederick said, stepping back, “is Collins’s conversation to have. Not mine.” He adjusted the strap of his bag across his chest. “But Sonia, whatever you think you know about what happened to Maurice, it’s smaller than the real thing. Whatever you’ve built in three weeks of watching Wesley Anderson?” He paused. “Wesley wasn’t the top of it. He wasn’t even close to the top of it.”

He walked away before I could respond. No dramatic exit, just a boy with a heavy secret folding himself back into the morning crowd, gone between one breath and the next.

I stood at the bottom of the Dalton Hall steps with the fog burning off the courtyard around me and my brother’s name in my mouth like something I couldn’t swallow.

Wesley wasn’t the top of it.

I pulled out my phone. Opened the CW folder. Added one line.

Then I looked up.

Collins was standing across the courtyard, sixty feet away, watching me with his hands in his pockets and that unreadable face that I was beginning to understand wasn’t emptiness at all.

It was discipline.

He had watched Frederick walk away from me. He had seen whatever was on my face in the thirty seconds after. And he was looking at me now the way someone looked at a fire they had started on purpose. Not to destroy anything, but because they needed the light and had decided the burn was worth it.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number. Same one as last night.

One message.

There’s a name on that USB drive you haven’t found yet. Room 114, Hargrove Library. Tonight. Come alone.

I read it twice.

Looked up.

Collins was gone.