Marissa didn't answer her phone for four days after the locker incident.
When she finally did, her voice was different — flat, exhausted, the fragile trust of the past few weeks seemingly gone. "I heard what happened," she said. "The break-in. I can't do this. I have a job, I have a life I've spent ten years rebuilding. If this blows up and it doesn't work — if he manages to spin it, the way he clearly already has some kind of plan to — I lose everything, and you two get grounded for a semester. That's not an equal trade."
"Marissa—"
"I'm sorry," she said, and the line went dead.
Nathan sat with Sasha on the school's back steps that afternoon, the weight of the past six weeks pressing down harder than it ever had. The evidence, digital copies aside, had been reduced to a scanned photog
