Chapter Twenty Five
507 Words
Writer’s POV
The next morning, the air at Manchester High felt… wrong.
Too still. Too quiet.
Like the whole school was holding its breath.
Mila sat at her desk, trying to focus on the equations scrawled across the board, but her mind kept circling back to the photograph — the one she and Xavier had found, the one that shouldn’t exist.
Every time she blinked, she saw it again:
Her face. Xavier’s. And Lennox standing behind them, smiling like he’d been there all along.
She forced herself to look up.
Lennox was late.
Five minutes. Ten.
Then — the door creaked open.
He walked in like he owned the place. His usual calm grin stretched a little too wide, eyes glittering with something unreadable.
“Apologies for the delay,” he said smoothly, setting his bag down. “Technical difficulties. Seems the school’s network doesn’t like me much these days.”
The students laughed lightly. Mila didn’t.
She glanced at Xavier. He didn’t move — just stared ahead, jaw tense, pretending to take notes.
But she saw it. The flicker in his eyes.
He felt it too.
Lennox began the lesson as if nothing was wrong, his voice calm, rhythm steady. But every few sentences, his gaze would drift.
Not over the class — to them.
“Some things,” he said casually, “are better left unexamined. Especially when the truth doesn’t want to be found.”
The chalk in Mila’s hand snapped in two.
Her breath caught.
A few students looked up, confused. Lennox only smiled faintly, continuing like it was all part of the lecture.
Then, halfway through, he paused to write a formula on the board.
His handwriting was neat, almost too precise.
But at the bottom corner — where only Mila and Xavier could see — he wrote something else, barely visible under the glare of the projector light:
“Still curious?”
Xavier’s pen froze mid-air.
Lennox capped the marker, turned, and leaned casually against the desk.
“Curiosity,” he said, “is a beautiful thing. Until it’s not.”
The room felt colder.
Every word was for them — and they both knew it.
When the bell finally rang, the class erupted into noise, students packing up fast. But Mila stayed still, staring at the board, at the faint trace of that hidden message.
“Don’t,” Xavier muttered under his breath.
She turned to him. “He knows, Xavier.”
“I know he knows,” he said tightly, grabbing his bag. “That’s the problem.”
Lennox brushed past them on his way out, pausing just long enough to whisper, so low only they could hear:
“Dig too deep, and you might not like who you find.”
Then he was gone.
The door shut softly behind him.
Mila and Xavier stood frozen in the empty classroom — both realizing, for the first time, that maybe this wasn’t just about a glitch, or a photograph, or even a secret.
Maybe someone had rewritten the truth itself.
- Writer
