BOUGHT BY SILENCE, BOUND BY BLOOD

**Chapter 5: Pretending**

For four days, Annabelle became very good at a new kind of invisibility — not the old kind, the one poverty had taught her, but a sharper, more deliberate version aimed at exactly one person.

She switched seats in Ilori's seminar, moving from the front row to a spot near the side wall where she could watch the board without watching him. She timed her shifts at The Grind around the class schedule she'd memorized without meaning to, making sure she was off the floor before seven-eleven. She told Josie, when Josie asked why she seemed off, that it was just exam stress, and hated herself a little for the lie, because Josie had never once made her feel like she owed the truth on a schedule she couldn't keep.

Max, for his part, was doing an equally poor job of pretending nothing had happened.

"You've said maybe six words to me in three days," Wes observed on Wednesday, watching Max stare at the same page of his laptop for the length of an entire song. "Which, for you, is basically a hunger strike."

"I'm fine."

"You've also stopped going to The Grind. You loved The Grind. You once called their oat milk 'a personal achievement.'"

Max closed the laptop. "I switched to the place on Elm."

"The place on Elm is objectively worse and twice the walk, and you know this because you complained about it for a week when they opened." Wes dropped into the chair across from him, arms crossed, patient in the way only someone who'd known Max since middle school could afford to be. "Something happened at Delta Row. You've been weird since the party."

"Nothing happened."

"Right." Wes didn't push it, not directly — he'd learned a long time ago that pushing Max only made the walls go up faster — but something in his face said he wasn't buying the denial, and wouldn't be, until Max decided to stop offering it.

Priya proved harder to deflect. She'd noticed the change too, in the specific, attentive way of someone who'd spent a long time cataloguing every shift in Max's mood as though it might eventually mean something for her. She cornered him after their Thursday seminar, voice light, eyes not light at all.

"You left the party early on Friday," she said. "I looked for you to say bye."

"I was tired."

"Mm." She fell into step beside him, matching his pace with the ease of long practice. "Funny. Reyes left early too. Around the same time, I think."

Max kept his face very still — the old skill, the one his father had drilled into him since childhood, useful now for entirely the wrong reasons. "I wouldn't know. I don't track her schedule."

"No," Priya said, "of course not," in a tone that made clear she didn't believe a word of it, and let the silence stretch just long enough to be uncomfortable before changing the subject to something about the upcoming midterm, as though she hadn't just planted a small, careful flag in the ground.

She had, in fact, seen more than she was saying. She'd noticed Max leave the roof. She'd noticed, twenty minutes later, that Annabelle Reyes had vanished from Josie Kim's side without a word to anyone. She hadn't seen where either of them went, not exactly, but she had spent three years learning to read Max Whitfield the way Annabelle read equations, and the numbers, this time, weren't adding up in her favor.

She said nothing else about it. Not yet. But she filed it away, the way she filed everything that might one day be useful, in the cold, careful part of her mind she reserved for anything that threatened the future she'd already decided was hers.

By Friday, Annabelle's careful avoidance ran into a wall she hadn't accounted for: her landlord.

"Pipe burst in the east wing," the resident advisor announced to the hallway meeting, not quite masking her irritation at having to deal with it on a Friday evening. "Maintenance says it's going to be at least three weeks before those rooms are livable again. We're doing temporary housing swaps for anyone affected — you'll double up with rooms on the west side that have space."

Annabelle, standing at the back of the meeting because Josie's room was in the affected wing, felt a distant, unbothered curiosity about which unlucky west-side student was about to inherit a roommate. It did not occur to her, even for a second, to wonder if it might be her problem — until the RA read down the list of room assignments, and her own name landed, with the particular cruelty of coincidence, next to a room number she recognized immediately, because she'd been standing in the doorway of it four days ago at seven in the morning, gathering her things to leave.

"That can't be right," she said, too loudly, and half the hallway turned to look at her.

The RA checked the sheet again, unbothered. "Room 412. Says here it's a single occupied by a Maxwell Whitfield — he's got the space for a temporary double. Congratulations, you two are roommates for the next three weeks."

Across the hallway, close enough to have heard every word, Max went very still.

Annabelle had exactly one thought, clear and cold above the panic: of course.

I can't stay in the same room with him. other girls were glaring at her, wishing it was their name on the paper. she wasn't even bothered by their glares but the smirk on max face.

it looked like he was happy about it or he planned it.