BOUGHT BY SILENCE, BOUND BY BLOOD

**Chapter 8: Explainable**

The nausea started on a Tuesday, and Annabelle explained it away before it had even fully arrived.

Stress, she decided, pressing the heel of her hand against her stomach in the back row of her ethics seminar, waiting for the wave of it to pass. Stress, and the granola bar she'd eaten too fast between shifts, and the general accumulated exhaustion of three alarms a morning and a mother whose voice had sounded thinner on the phone last night than Annabelle wanted to examine too closely. She had a mental filing system built over years of practice, and every new symptom slotted neatly into a drawer already labeled things caused by not having enough money or sleep. It had never once let her down before.

She didn't mention it to anyone. Not Josie, who would have worried. Not Max, who had no business worrying about her and whom she was still, with some effort, keeping at the careful professional distance she'd demanded on their first night in Room 412 — a distance that had grown steadily more theoretical with each passing day, though neither of them had said so out loud.

The theoretical nature of it became harder to maintain on Thursday, when she came back from her shift at The Grind to find Max had left a plate on her side of the desk — a sandwich, cut in half the way she liked, with a granola bar balanced on top that was suspiciously the same brand she always split and saved half of.

"I noticed you don't really eat lunch," he said, not looking up from his own reading, deliberately casual in a way that fooled absolutely no one. "Figured I'd order extra."

"You didn't have to do that."

"I know. Eat it anyway." A beat. "It's not charity. It's roommate maintenance. I need you functional enough to argue with me about branch-and-bound, it's the highlight of my week."

She almost smiled — the old defenses fraying at the corners without her permission — and ate the sandwich in three bites, hungrier than she wanted to admit, and didn't examine too closely why the small kindness of it sat so warm and unfamiliar in her chest.

The nausea came back that night, worse, and she sat very still on the edge of the cot in the dark until it passed, grateful Max's breathing across the room had already evened into sleep.

Stress, she told herself again, and believed it, because the alternative wasn't a thought she had room to entertain — not with rent due, not with her mother's next appointment looming, not with a scholarship contingent on a GPA she couldn't afford to let slip while she chased down a symptom that was almost certainly nothing.

Josie noticed first, in the specific way close friends notice things before the person living inside the body does.

"You've turned down coffee three times this week," she said, watching Annabelle wave off the thermos Josie always brought to their Sunday study session in the library. "You. Who once described coffee as, and I quote, 'the only reliable thing in my life.'"

"Just been tasting weird lately. Probably a bug."

"You've also been weirdly tired. And you flinched at the smell of the tuna sandwich guy two tables over like it personally offended you."

"It's a genuinely offensive smell."

"Annabelle."

"I'm fine, Jose. Seriously." She kept her eyes on her notes, aware of the particular quality of Josie's attention, the kind that saw further than Annabelle wanted anyone seeing right now. "It's exam season. Everyone's a little off."

Josie didn't push, not directly, though something in her expression said she was filing the observation away for later, the way good friends did — not accusing, just watching, patient enough to wait until the truth was ready to surface on its own.

Annabelle went back to her reading and didn't let herself do the math that some small, quiet part of her brain kept trying to run in the background — a count of weeks, a count of days since Delta Row, a sum she wasn't prepared to solve.

It's nothing, she told the part of her brain running the numbers. It's stress. It's always been stress. It will keep being stress, because I don't have the money or the time for it to be anything else.

The part of her brain running the numbers did not, unfortunately, care very much what she could afford.