Martha flew in the next day.
She said Dad had asked her to. I knew better. She had lasted approximately thirty-six hours in Washington before deciding that a new city and a new school and a new everything was more than one person should navigate alone, and that one person was me, and that she was the relevant authority on what I needed regardless of geography or the technical terms of her employment.
She would take the *your father asked me* version to her grave.
I would let her, because some fictions are themselves a form of love.
She made me sit at the kitchen counter and tell her everything — the flight, the house, Mariah and Evie, Sam and the mirror checks, the first morning, Lue at the classroom door. She listened with the focused attention of someone cross-referencing everything against a file she'd been building for seventeen years. When I got to the cafeteria — the staring, the running, the Uber — she pressed her mouth into a thin line.
"It's not funny," I said.
"I know," she said. In the tone of someone who was finding it very funny.
"Martha."
"I said I know." She patted my hand with the brisk affection of someone who has been managing me since I was four. "Tell me about the boy."
"There's no boy."
"The one you ran from."
"I ran from a *situation.*"
"Asia."
"Martha."
She let it go with the patience of someone who has no intention of actually letting it go and simply needs it to be somewhere else for now. Martha plays the long game better than anyone I've ever met. It's terrifying. I respect it completely.
---
The week built itself into a shape I hadn't chosen but could work with.
Sam drove me in. I took front-row seats in every class, which Lue found personally offensive. I had lunch with Nate and Lue. I caught up on coursework, signed up for Model UN because Lue had helped me not get a detention on day one and I owed her something. I mapped the building. I learned the rhythms — which corridors were congested between which periods, which teachers tolerated what, which parts of the campus felt like neutral ground.
And I avoided Damien.
Not elegantly. There was a Tuesday — detective coat Tuesday, Nate called it — where I wore a structured, oversized black jacket specifically to disappear into hallway crowds when I saw him coming from the science block. There was a Thursday where I ducked into a doorway and waited four counted minutes while he passed. Nate found all of this cosmically hilarious. I found it pragmatic.
"What exactly do you think he's going to do?" Nate asked on Tuesday, watching me peer around the corner of the water fountains.
"I don't know," I said. "That's the problem."
The not-knowing was the thing. With known problems you had options — you could calculate, prepare, find the angle. With Damien I had no angle yet. I had a hallway, a cafeteria, a smile like the beginning of something, and the word *recognition* that I kept putting away and kept finding again.
Saint I was also circling wide around, which was harder because Saint moved through the school like someone who existed in every corridor simultaneously. He hadn't done anything, technically. He had simply stood in a hallway and watched and let things happen, and that technically-nothing had the specific weight of a choice.
Arthur was busy. Oxford busy — the consuming, disorienting kind that eats people during the first term. Our calls had gotten shorter and clipped, his voice carrying the background noise of a life assembling itself without me in it. I had stopped calling as often. I did not want to become the obligation that pulled him backward from the thing he was building forward.
So. Routine. Front seats. Lue.
Fine. It was fine.
---
Thursday, last period, PE.
Mr. Morales had effectively surrendered on the girls' track participation and was spending his professional energy on the boys' soccer practice happening on the adjacent field. Nate was out there — they had a rivalry match against Margaret's Hollow coming up that he kept describing as a *friendly game* with the face of someone who did not understand the meaning of the word friendly.
Lue and I were running our last lap at the pace of people who had made peace with not trying.
"Watch it," she said, not looking up from whatever she was thinking about as a ball sailed over our heads from the field. "That head of yours doesn't bounce."
"I'm fine," I said. "I've taken harder—"
And then I saw him.
Coming off the pitch toward the water station, training vest damp, dark hair pushed back off his face. Moving with that particular quality he had — unhurried, like time adjusted itself to accommodate him rather than the other way around. He hadn't seen me. Or he had and was performing not having seen me, and I had already learned that with Damien those two things were not the same.
My body voted.
I ran.
"*Asia—*"
I didn't stop. Cut across the track, through the side gate, into the nearest building — the training complex, long and brick, girls' changing rooms at the far end. Pushed through the bathroom door. Turned the lock. Dropped against the cold tile wall and breathed.
*Sixty seconds,* I told myself. *Feel ridiculous for sixty seconds and then function.*
"What have you been doing?"
My head came up so fast I nearly caught myself on the sink.
Saint was against the far wall, arms loose at his sides, in a girls' bathroom he had no business being in, looking at me with the specific expression of someone who had expected this and was mildly entertained by the confirmation. Beside him — fixing her hair with the focused energy of someone pretending the last several minutes hadn't occurred — was Ankhe from my AP Physics class.
I looked at them.
They looked at me.
"This," I said carefully, "is the girls' bathroom."
"It is," Saint said. Unbothered.
"So."
"You're not interrupting anything." He glanced at Ankhe without looking at her. "Ankhe. Leave."
She left with the speed of someone who had been looking for permission, and the glare she gave me on her way out was impressive in its specificity — she had decided this was my fault and committed to it fully.
The door swung shut.
The room was very quiet.
Saint looked at me with the reading-small-print expression.
"So," he said. "Why are you hiding in here, Asia?"
"I'm not hiding." I crossed my arms. Uncrossed them immediately because crossing them felt like admitting something. "I needed a moment."
"You ran across a track in PE shoes, cut through a gate, and locked yourself in a bathroom." He tilted his head. "That's hiding."
"He tried to hit me with a ball."
"He was at practice."
"On my *head.*"
Something moved near his mouth. Not quite a smile but occupying the same neighbourhood. "You pissed him off."
"By existing, apparently."
"By running." He pushed off the wall then, slowly, and I understood that this was the thing about Saint — he moved like someone who had never had to rush for anything, and the effect was that even a short room felt long. I held my ground. I was not going to back up in a tiled bathroom because a boy with white-streaked hair decided to walk toward me. "Running makes it interesting. He doesn't like people who run."
"Then he can file a complaint." I kept my voice even. "And you can tell him I'm a new student who wants a quiet last year with no casualties. It's very simple."
"Apologize to him."
I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Damien." Still moving, unhurried. He stopped at a distance that was closer than polite conversation and further than threat — the specific in-between that required a decision about how to stand. "Apologize. Get it done. You can't spend the year hiding in this bathroom every time he's on the same field."
"He's the one who—"
"I know what he is." No inflection. No softening. Just fact, laid flat. "Do it anyway."
I looked at him. Up close, Saint had the particular quality of someone who had thought about every possible version of a conversation before arriving at it. He wasn't performing patience. He was patient — in the specific way of someone who has learned that most things resolve if you don't interfere with them prematurely.
"Will he listen?" I asked.
"He'll listen to you." A pause. Something shifted in his eyes — brief, contained, noting something. "With you, specifically."
I didn't know what that meant.
I thought I might be starting to know what that meant.
I moved on from that thought efficiently.
"You're not angry with me," I said. "He's your best friend and I called him a psycho in front of the entire cafeteria."
"You're stupid," Saint said simply. "And Damien is my best friend. Both of those things are true. Neither one cancels the other."
He moved toward the door. Pulled it open. Held it. Light from the corridor came through in a stripe, and he was already angled away, already done with the conversation, and then he stopped.
"One more thing." Not quite turning back. Just enough. "Stay away from Nate."
The door closed.
I stood in the sudden quiet and let that sit.
Nate. Who had warm eyes and a good handshake and hadn't done anything except be friendly and show me where Evergreen was. What did Nate have to do with any of this?
I turned on the tap. Threw cold water on my face. Looked at myself in the mirror — at the girl who had been in New York for less than a week and had already hidden in two bathrooms on the same campus — and said, out loud, to no one:
"Figure it out."
---
Getting Lue to stay after practice took forty minutes of negotiation and a promise I couldn't yet specify.
She didn't want to. She had the specific reluctance of someone who knew Damien better than I did and was trying to find the diplomatic language for *this is a bad idea* without saying it directly. I told her it would be fine. She said *probably*. The word *probably* was doing considerable structural work in that sentence and we both knew it.
We waited on the bleachers while the team finished. Nate spotted us on his way off the pitch and came over with that easy warmth he carried everywhere, and I caught his eye and gave him the expression that meant *please go away and trust me about why* and he read most of it. He left. Not happily, but he left.
"You know," Lue said quietly, after a minute.
"Know what?"
She was watching the pitch. Not looking at me. "How you look at him."
I said nothing.
"Like all the others," she said. Still not looking at me. "I'm not judging you. I'm just—" She stopped. Shrugged one shoulder. "Saying."
I swallowed whatever was in my throat.
"I just need to fix this," I said.
"Okay," she said. In the tone of someone accepting an answer they don't believe but are choosing to honor.
We sat with it.
Damien came off the field with Saint at his shoulder — always Saint at his shoulder, I was beginning to understand, the way certain things come in pairs so naturally you stop registering them as two. Saint saw me over Damien's shoulder before Damien did, and something crossed his face — a fast, private something — and then it was gone, replaced by the default expression, and he said something low into Damien's ear and Damien's head turned.
His eyes found me immediately. Like he'd already known where to look.
Lue took a breath beside me.
She walked over. I waited on the grass with my hands in my coat pockets and my speech assembled and my heart doing something uncooperative. I watched Lue say something to Damien, watched his eyes move between her and me, watched Saint smirk once with the private satisfaction of someone watching an outcome they predicted, and then Saint turned and walked away.
*Good luck,* his back said.
Damien looked at Lue for one more moment. Then: "Parking lot. Fifteen minutes."
He left.
Lue came back.
"He'll see you," she said. "For whatever that's worth."
"It's worth something."
"Asia." She looked at me directly, the clearest she'd looked at me since we met. "Damien doesn't do *friendly talks.* Whatever you think this is—" She stopped. Started again. "Just say what you came to say. Don't elaborate. Don't try to read him while you're saying it. And whatever he does, don't let him see you flinch."
I nodded.
She looked like she wanted to say something else. She didn't.
We walked to the parking lot.
---
His car was black.
Of course it was black. The whole aesthetic was internally consistent — the dark clothes, the everything-black car, the way he managed to make even a parking lot feel like a room he owned. I registered all of this and filed it under *noted, irrelevant.*
He was already there when we arrived, engine running, window down. The cold air coming off the AC even from the outside.
I walked to the driver's side.
"Damien, I—"
"Get in."
Lue's voice behind me went sharp. "I'm giving her a ride."
He looked at her.
That was all he did. Just looked. And somehow the look was enough — not threatening, not warm, just very direct in the specific way of someone who does not consider *no* a viable outcome and has never had cause to update this assumption. Lue held it for two seconds. Then her jaw set and she looked at me.
"*Fuck* you, Damien," she said, evenly, and walked away.
He watched her go. Then he turned back to me.
And waited.
I stood there in the gap between my plan and what was actually happening. I did a rapid assessment of my options — all three of them — and made the only realistic choice and got in the car.
---
Black leather interior. Cold air that seemed to come from somewhere below comfortable. The particular silence of a space that had been designed for someone who didn't need it filled.
I had my speech. I had practiced it. It was short and clean and required no response from him and would resolve everything.
"Damien, I wanted to—"
He pressed down on the accelerator.
The city lurched and my words went with it — the speech just simply left, evaporated, replaced by the physical reality of a car moving too fast and my hand grabbing the door handle and the buildings blurring at the edges of the windows. Not reckless. Precise. The specific speed of someone making a point through the body rather than language.
His knuckles were white on the wheel.
I grabbed the seat belt with my other hand and held both and waited it out.
"I said I'm sorry," I said. Over the speed. Loud and clear. "I'm sorry for what I said in the cafeteria. I was rude and it was public and it was unnecessary."
The car slowed.
Stopped.
Not at a light — just stopped, engine idling, in the middle of a residential street I didn't recognise. Both of us sitting in the sudden quiet with the city continuing indifferently around us.
I released the door handle. Exhaled carefully.
He stared at the road. His jaw was doing the held-in thing, the effortful containment. Slowly, it eased.
"Don't do it again," he said. Very quiet. The shift from the speed to this was its own kind of pressure — the contrast between them more unsettling than either one alone. "Don't disobey me."
I looked at him. "Disobey you."
"The parking lot." He turned to look at me. First time since I'd got in the car, and the effect was — the green of his eyes at this distance was a different quality than it had been across a cafeteria. More specific. More present. Like they were made of something older than the rest of him. "You gave Lue room to speak to me like that."
"Lue made her own choices."
"And you let her." Simple. Like it was the most obvious thing. "Don't do that again."
There were things I wanted to say to this. Specific, pointed things about the word *disobey* and what century he thought we were in. I sorted through them, assessed each one, and discarded all of them — because I was in his car, on a street I couldn't name, and I had not yet learned enough of his edges to know which words would land where.
"Okay," I said.
He held my gaze. Something in his face that I couldn't fully categorise — not satisfaction, something more complicated than that. Like he was deciding whether *okay* was the right shape or whether he needed more of it.
He started the car. Pulled back into the road.
We drove.
He didn't ask for my address. I didn't ask how he knew it. I watched the city in the passenger window and from my peripheral vision I watched him — the architecture of his face at rest, brows slightly arched, the line of his jaw, the specific stillness of someone who was not unaware of being watched and had decided to let it happen.
He was a very particular kind of beautiful. The specific aggravating kind that would have been significantly more manageable if it hadn't come with everything else.
He turned into my street.
He stopped at my driveway.
I sat for a moment in the particular uncertainty of not knowing the protocol.
"Thank you," I said. "For the ride."
He nodded once. Then: "Phone."
"My—"
He held out his hand.
I gave it to him. He typed something — ten seconds, unhurried — and handed it back. His contact, saved under just his first name. No elaboration. No context.
*Damien.*
"I have yours now," he said. "Don't be stupid again."
I got out of the car. Walked up the path to the front door. I was aware of the engine still running behind me — the specific, patient idling of something that hadn't left yet — and when I got to the door I turned back once, because something made me turn.
He was watching.
Not the cafeteria expression. Not the hallway one. Not the green-eyed precision of the car. Something quieter than all of those — something that looked, briefly, like the person underneath the performance, surfaced just long enough to be visible before the control came back down over it.
I raised my hand. A small, somewhat idiotic wave.
He drove away.
---
Martha was in the hallway.
She had the look of someone who had been at the window for longer than she intended and had decided to be at the hallway instead.
"Who was that?" Smiling before she finished the question.
"Nobody."
"You waved at nobody."
"Martha—"
"And nobody," she said, with the satisfaction of someone completing a proof, "waited to watch you get inside."
I walked past her toward the kitchen. "What's for dinner?"
"Pasta. And we are not done."
"We are done, Martha."
"We are not done," she said cheerfully, to my back.
---
I tried to call him at nine.
I want to be transparent about this. I told myself I had a reason — confirming the contact, basic courtesy, a completely legitimate and non-embarrassing follow-up to a conversation that required follow-up. I had a list of justifications and I was aware that having a list was itself diagnostic but I made the call anyway.
He didn't pick up.
I tried again.
And again.
The third time it rang twice and went to voicemail — not the same as going straight to voicemail, which meant the phone was on, which meant he had seen the call, which meant—
I put my phone face-down on the nightstand.
I looked at my ceiling.
Outside the window New York was doing what New York did at nine on a weeknight — moving, loud, completely uninterested in the specific interior weather of one girl in one room who had made three phone calls to a person she had known for less than a week and was currently performing unbothered with an audience of zero.
I was not unbothered.
I was, in fact, precisely as bothered as someone who had grown up believing she was the most dangerous thing in any room — and had just spent a week discovering that she had been playing at danger the entire time.
*This is new,* some part of me noted. Calmly. Almost scientifically.
*I don't have a map for this.*
I picked up the journal.
Opened it to the Damien entry. The two lines I'd been keeping it to — *not a simple problem* — and underneath it, what I'd added after Saint: *he learned control before he learned anything else.*
I looked at both of them for a long time.
Then I wrote a third line.
*He waited at the end of the driveway to watch me get inside.*
I stared at that.
Closed the journal.
Lay back on the bed.
Did not sleep for an embarrassingly long time.