Fake yours.

Chapter 8

Campus security took forty minutes and produced a reference number, a form, and the measured reassurance of someone who dealt with these situations regularly enough to have a script for them. The officer was thorough without being alarming. She noted the photograph, the messages, the notes, the pattern of escalation. She told Zara they would look into it and to report anything further immediately.

Walking out into the afternoon, Amara looped her arm through Zara’s without comment.

“See,” she said. “Still alive.”

“You were right.”

“I’m writing that down.”

Zara laughed briefly, involuntarily.

Amara squeezed her arm and steered her toward the courtyard, talking about something else entirely, and for twenty minutes Zara let herself be carried by the easy current of a friendship that had never required her to be anything other than exactly who she was. It was, she thought, one of the underrated comforts of being known the relief of not having to explain yourself.

Her shift ended at seven. The campus had gone amber and quiet in the particular way of early autumn evenings, the light thickening, the air carrying the first real suggestion of winter underneath the residual warmth. Noah was waiting by the door when she came out, jacket on, hands in his pockets, and they fell into step without discussion.

Neither of them decided to walk toward the lake. They simply walked, and the path went that way, and neither of them commented on it.

“Can I ask you something,” she said.

“You can ask me anything.”

“Does it bother you. The recruitment pressure. The way everyone talks about your future like it’s already been decided.”

He was quiet for a moment — not deflecting, she’d learned to tell the difference, just finding the honest answer rather than the available one. “It bothers me that I don’t know if I chose it or if it chose me,” he said finally. “I’ve been good at basketball since I was twelve, and everyone around me responded to that, and I kept going, and at some point it became who I am. I don’t know if I would have chosen it if anyone had actually asked.”

“Has anyone ever asked?”

“No.”

She thought about that. The path curved alongside the lake, the water holding the last of the light. Somewhere across it a bird moved through the reeds and was gone.

“My mother worked double shifts for eight months before my financial aid came through,” she said. She hadn’t planned to say it. “She never told me. I found out from my aunt two years later. She just handled it, and kept calling to ask how my grades were, and never once made me feel like a weight she was carrying.” She paused. “I’ve been trying to make that mean something ever since. Like if I graduate with honors and build something stable and never need anyone to cover for me again, it justifies what she did.”

Noah didn’t respond immediately. They walked for a few steps in the quiet that had become, without her quite noticing, one of her favorite things about being near him the quality of his silence, the way it didn’t require filling.

“She probably just loves you,” he said. “Without the justification attached.”

Zara looked at the water. “I know. That almost makes it harder.”

He stopped walking. She stopped half a step later and turned, and he was closer than she’d registered — close enough that she had to look up slightly to meet his eyes. The lake was very still behind him. The last of the light was going, slowly, the sky moving through colors she didn’t have names for.

He reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Slowly. With the particular deliberateness of someone making a decision rather than acting on impulse, giving her every opportunity to step back. His fingers grazed her cheekbone so lightly she might have imagined it except that she didn’t imagine it, and she didn’t step back, and neither of them said anything for a moment.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said quietly. Not as reassurance as information, offered plainly, without performance. “Whatever this is. I’m not going anywhere.”

She looked at him for a long moment. The careful part of her the part that had been managing and calculating and maintaining distance since before she could remember was still present, still noting the risk with its usual precision. She noticed it, acknowledged it, and stayed where she was anyway.

“Okay,” she said. For the second time that day. With a different weight entirely.

He smiled — slowly, the real version, the one that had nothing to do with the public — and dropped his hand. They stood by the lake until the light was nearly gone, not talking much, not needing to, before walking back toward her building at the unhurried pace of people who aren’t ready for the evening to end.

At her door he paused.

“Lock it,” he said.

“I always lock it.”

“Text me when you’re inside.”

She looked at him. “You’re very bossy for someone I didn’t invite into my life.”

“You didn’t stop me either.”

She couldn’t argue with that. She went inside and locked the door and stood in the quiet of her room for a moment, the evening still warm in her chest, the careful part of her noting with something between suspicion and resignation that she was in considerably more trouble than she had been three weeks ago.

She texted him: inside.

His reply came in under ten seconds: good.

She set the phone down and changed and got into bed and for the first time in days her mind went quiet quickly, the exhaustion of the week finally arriving now that her guard had come down enough to let it. She was almost asleep when the phone buzzed again.

Unknown number.

She sat up.

Opened it.

Four words and a photograph. The photograph was taken from a distance, indistinct in the low evening light, but clear enough two figures standing by the lake, one tucking something behind the other’s ear, neither of them moving away.

The four words read: Did he enjoy it?

She sat in the dark with the phone in both hands and the warmth of the evening entirely gone, replaced by something cold and specific and worse than before. Because whoever had sent this had been at the lake. Had stood close enough in the dark to see the details. Had watched the most unguarded moment she’d allowed herself in years.

And had said nothing.

Had simply watched.

And waited.

And taken the photograph.

And smiled, probably, at whatever they planned to do with it next.