Fake yours.

Chapter 7

She didn’t sleep.

Not after the text. Not after lying in the dark running through every face she could place, every person who knew her well enough to know which route she walked home, which shift she worked, what her scholarship correspondence looked like. The list kept arriving at the same problem: it was short. Shorter than she wanted it to be. The people who knew those things about her were people she had chosen to trust.

By three in the morning she had checked the door twice. By four she had opened her phone and stared at the photograph herself, from behind, the yellow flower still visible under her arm and closed it again. By five she gave up on sleep entirely and sat at her desk with the lamp on low and her psychology textbook open to a page about cognitive distortions, which felt, under the circumstances, like a personal insult.

Now you’ve made him a target too.

She read it again. Then locked her phone. The specific cruelty of it was what kept returning not the threat itself but the precision. Whoever was sending these messages wasn’t operating from panic or impulse. They were calibrated. They knew exactly which sentence would keep her awake until five in the morning rearranging everything she thought she understood.

Amara knocked at seven, already dressed, carrying two coffees from the building’s ground floor machine that were never as good as the café but were immediate, which mattered.

“You look terrible,” she said, handing one over.

“I know.”

Amara sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her with the particular attention of someone who had known her long enough to read past the surface. Her expression when she read the messages was uncomplicated and immediate her jaw tightened, her eyes went sharp, and she handed the phone back with the decisive energy of someone who had already decided what happened next.

“Campus security. Today.”

“Amara”

“Not a conversation. Today.” She stood up and started moving around the room with the restless momentum she got when something had made her genuinely angry. “Someone followed you home. Someone photographed you without your knowledge and sent it to your phone to frighten you. That is not something you manage quietly by yourself.”

“I don’t know who it is.”

“That’s exactly why you report it. So that people whose job it is to find out can start finding out.” She stopped and looked at Zara directly. “I will go with you. Right now, before class. Let’s go.”

Zara looked at her this person who had dragged her to a party she didn’t want to attend and defended her to strangers on the internet and shown up at seven in the morning with bad coffee and immediate anger on her behalf and felt something loosen slightly in the tightness she’d been carrying since the night before.

“After my morning lecture,” she said.

Amara pointed at her. “I’m holding you to that.”

“I know you are.”

She made it through her morning lecture on autopilot, taking notes without retaining them, her attention split between the front of the room and the low persistent hum of trying to think clearly about something she couldn’t think clearly about. After class she sat in the library for an hour achieving nothing, then gave up and walked to the café early to set up for her shift.

Noah was outside when she arrived.

Not waiting, exactly he was leaning against the wall beside the entrance reading something on his phone with the focused expression of someone actually reading rather than performing it, and he looked up when she approached with the directness she had stopped being startled by and hadn’t quite admitted she’d stopped being startled by.

“You didn’t text me back this morning,” he said.

“I was in class.”

“Before class.”

She unlocked the café door. “I didn’t know we had a texting arrangement.”

“We do now.” He followed her inside without being invited, which she had also stopped commenting on. “You look like you didn’t sleep.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“Because it’s visibly true.” He sat at the counter while she tied her apron, watching her in the way that was becoming familiar not intrusive, just present, the quality of attention of someone who had decided she was worth paying attention to and wasn’t embarrassed about it. “Did something else happen?”

She considered, briefly, saying no. Then she took out her phone and slid it across the counter.

He read the message without touching the phone, leaning forward slightly with his forearms on the counter. The stillness that came over him was the same as before deliberate, controlled, the quiet of someone managing something by keeping very still.

“When did this arrive?”

“Last night. After I left Adrian.”

“While you were walking home.”

“Yes.”

He straightened. Pushed the phone back across the counter with one finger, carefully, like he was setting something down he didn’t trust himself to hold. “I’m walking you home after your shift.”

“Noah”

“Not a discussion.”

“I’m capable of”

“C I know.” He met her eyes. “I know you are. I’ve been watching you be capable of things for weeks. This isn’t about that.” A pause, short and certain. “Someone is threatening you because of me. That makes it mine to be part of.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Outside the café window the morning moved past students, bicycles, the ordinary momentum of a campus doing what it always did. Inside was quieter. Warmer.

“Okay,” she said.

Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise relief, she thought, which she hadn’t expected and didn’t know what to do with.

He stayed for her entire shift, occupying a corner table with his textbook, and if her manager noticed he had the decency not to comment. Between customers she found herself glancing over without meaning to, and twice he looked up at the same moment and they both looked away, and the third time neither of them did.