The Note Left Behind

Getting Closer

"Can I tell you something?" Sasha asked, later that same night, once the immediate tension had eased into something quieter.

"You usually just do, without asking."

That got a small, tired laugh out of her — not the bright, easy one he'd gotten used to, but something more honest. "I'm scared," she said. "Not of Callahan, exactly. Of — messing this up. Of pushing so hard we hurt Marissa worse than whatever already happened to her. I don't actually know what I'm doing. I just know I can't stop."

Nathan looked at her for a long moment — really looked, the way he looked at things he wanted to remember correctly. The porch-light glow from the string of solar lanterns she'd hung along the treehouse ceiling caught the side of her face, softened everything about her that usually looked so certain.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I don't think you're messing it up."

"You didn't want to do this at all, a month ago."

"No," Nathan admitted. "But you were right that we couldn't just put it back and forget it. Some things don't stay flush once you notice they're crooked."

Sasha smiled, small and real. "Is that a metaphor?"

"Everything's a metaphor if you think about it long enough."

She laughed again, the real laugh this time, and for a moment neither of them said anything else, just sat in the quiet of the treehouse with the folder of evidence between them and something unspoken settling comfortably into the space where fear had been sitting all week.

"Thank you," Sasha said eventually. "For not letting me do this alone."

"You'd have done it alone anyway."

"Probably," she admitted. "Badly. But alone."

Nathan didn't say what he was thinking — that somewhere in the last month, watching her chase down a truth that wasn't even hers to chase, he'd started to feel something for her that had very little to do with the mystery at all. He didn't have to say it. Looking at her in the lantern light, he suspected she already knew.

"Can I ask you something?" he said instead, needing somewhere safer to direct the feeling.

"Always."

"Why archive project, though? Out of everyone in our English class, why me?"

Sasha considered the question seriously, tilting her head like she was actually working out the honest answer rather than reaching for something easy. "Because you notice things," she said finally. "Even before any of this. I used to watch you in class — you'd catch details nobody else did. The way a teacher's voice changed when they were bored of their own lecture. The exact moment someone was about to cry and trying not to. I thought, if I ever needed someone to actually see something important, it'd be you."

"That's oddly specific for someone who claims she never talks to me."

"I notice things too," Sasha said, a small, private smile tugging at her mouth. "Just different things than you do."

The lanterns flickered gently above them, and for a long moment neither of them said anything else, the quiet settling comfortably between them instead of pressing in the way silences usually did lately. It was, Nathan thought, one of the only moments all week that had felt entirely uncomplicated.

"We should probably head back," Sasha said eventually, though she didn't move to climb down right away.

"Probably," Nathan agreed, equally unmoving.

Neither of them left for another twenty minutes.