Fake yours.

Chapter 9

The metadata check happened on Sunday afternoon, in the corner of the library where Adrian liked to work because the wifi was strongest and the staff left him alone.

“You’re sure about this?” Zara asked, sliding into the seat across from him. “I don’t want you getting in trouble for something that isn’t really your area.”

“It’s not really anyone’s area,” Adrian said, already pulling out his laptop. “It’s not hacking, it’s just information most people don’t know is attached to a photo and I happen to know because half my actual research involves digital archives, which means I spend an unreasonable amount of time fighting with file properties that won’t cooperate.” He gave her a brief, dry look. “Turns out being chronically annoyed by metadata for two years has applications.”

He pulled up the lake photograph the one with the two figures and the four words above it and clicked through menus she didn’t recognize, his expression settling into the focused stillness he got when he was solving something.

“Okay,” he said finally. “There’s no GPS data. Whoever sent this stripped it, which means they know what they’re doing, at least a little.” He turned the laptop slightly so she could see. “But the angle and the distance are still useful. I cross-referenced it against the path layout.” He pulled up a campus map, zoomed to the lake. “Whoever took this was standing here.” He pointed. A spot just off the main path, behind a stand of trees, close enough to the bench Noah and Zara had stopped near that the figures in the photo were in focus.

“That’s not far,” Zara said.

“No.”

“That’s Adrian, that’s right there. Anyone walking past would have seen someone standing there.”

“Right.” He looked at her. “Which means either they were very lucky that no one else was around. Or they know the campus well enough to know exactly when no one would be.”

The library was quiet around them, the Sunday-afternoon hush of a building mostly empty. Zara stared at the map, at the small red dot Adrian had placed, close enough to where she’d stood with Noah that she could feel, retroactively, the sensation of being watched a phantom prickle at the back of her neck, days late.

“Someone who knows my schedule,” she said slowly. “And Noah’s. Well enough to predict where we’d be and when. Well enough to know that spot would be empty.”

Adrian didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. They were both arriving at the same place, and neither of them wanted to be the one to say it first because saying it first meant starting to look at the people closest to her, and neither of them wanted that to be where this went.

She told Noah that evening, in the quiet after her shift, sitting on the low wall outside the café with two coffees neither of them was drinking. He listened the way he’d learned to listen — without interrupting, his stillness deepening as she spoke, and when she finished he was quiet for long enough that she glanced over.

“Say something.”

“I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

“About how someone stood twenty feet from us and watched, and I didn’t notice, and that’s “ He stopped. Started again. “I’m supposed to notice things. I notice everything. Cameras, crowds, people watching its instinct, it’s been instinct since I was sixteen. And someone got that close, and I missed it. Because I wasn’t paying attention to anything except you.”

“Noah”

“That’s not a complaint.” He looked at her, and something in his expression was rawer than she’d seen from him before not the careful warmth, something underneath it. “It’s the opposite of a complaint. I just “ He exhaled. “I keep thinking about what would have happened if it had been more than a photograph. If whoever this is decided a photo wasn’t enough. And I wouldn’t have noticed until it was too late, because I was looking at you instead of watching for them.”

The honesty of it landed somewhere underneath her ribs, somewhere she didn’t have good defenses for.

“That’s not your fault,” she said.

“I know. It doesn’t help.”

They sat with that for a moment. The campus moved around them, students heading to dinner, the evening settling into the blue-gold of early autumn dusk. Zara turned her coffee cup slowly in her hands, and the thought that had been circling at the edges of her mind for days finally came close enough to look at directly.

This started when he started paying attention to me.

The video. The rumors. The messages. All of it it didn’t exist before him. Three weeks ago I was invisible, and invisible was safe, and now I’m not either of those things, and someone is watching me closely enough to know which path I take home and which bench I’ll stop at, and the only thing that’s changed is him.

She didn’t say any of this. But something in her face must have shifted, because Noah’s eyes sharpened, reading her the way he’d been doing for weeks now too well, she thought, with something between admiration and dread.

“What,” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Zara.”

“I’m tired. That’s all.”

He didn’t push, which she was grateful for and which also, somehow, made it worse because she could feel the thought taking root regardless of whether she said it aloud, settling into the part of her that had spent years building careful walls for exactly this reason. Getting close to people creates exposure. Exposure creates risk. You were safer alone.

She had known this. She had always known this. She just hadn’t expected the proof to arrive so literally, in the form of a photograph and four cold words.