The Billionaire's Cruel Bet

I spent a year keeping my broke, depressed boyfriend alive.

Tonight I delivered his dinner to a mansion in the hills.

It cost eighteen thousand dollars. One meal. Omakase, the fish flown in that morning from the other side of the world.

For twelve months I worked myself raw. Commissions till my eyes burned. Food runs till my legs gave out.

All of it to cover his therapy and his meds, to fix a sadness I believed in with everything I had.

I believed in it because I'd already lost my brother to the same darkness. I would have burned the world down before I let it take anyone else.

That belief was the bait. That was the part they were counting on.

My friends kept telling me to slow down before I ran myself into the ground.

I didn't listen. He needed me.

So when the order pinged from the gated hills, an address people like me only ever see from the service entrance, I carried it up to the door with both hands, head down, careful.

I looked up.

And there he was. My boyfriend. The one who was supposed to be in a therapist's office across town.

Standing in the doorway of a house I'd only ever seen in other people's lives, staring back at me like I was the ghost.

Chapter 1

"Aren't you supposed to be at your appointment, Caspian?"

I stood in the doorway of a house that belonged in someone else's life and gripped the takeout bag until my fingers ached.

A hundred and four degrees outside, and I was shaking like something cold had crawled into my bones.

"I'm sorry, Quinnie. Let me explain. Dr. Hartley canceled this afternoon. I just stopped by a friend's place, that's all."

He caught my sleeve. The same way he always did when he was sorry. It had never once failed him.

It failed him now.

I knocked his hand away.

His shirt was custom, some label I couldn't even name, and that was the joke of it. It fit him better than anything off a rack had ever fit me. It fit the rich kid he'd been the entire time.

I took out my phone and pulled up the Wexley health center portal. Dr. Hartley. Psychiatry. Three openings still on the board for that afternoon.

So even the excuse was a lie. I didn't have the energy left to say so.

I breathed in. Kept my face flat.

"Caspian. Did you have fun?"

"Playing the broke, depressed kid who couldn't spare four dollars for a coffee. When you're really a trust-fund prince who drops eighteen grand on a single omakase dinner."

My mouth was moving. I didn't feel the tears until they were already running.

"You ran me. Like I was stupid."

"Eighteen thousand dollars. That's six thousand deliveries. Two months on the road. For one of your meals."

And the funniest part? The only app still open on my phone, sitting behind everything else, was the message I'd sent him half an hour ago.

That I was making the short rib soup he loved tonight. That I'd splurge a little, because a customer up in the rich part of town had left me a hundred-dollar tip.

The tip was his.

He used to hold me in the dark and tell me I was the one love he would never doubt. That what I gave him was purer than anything his own parents had ever offered. It used to make me feel lucky.

Now I did the math.

Nobody gambles on heatstroke on the hottest day of the year to knock a few days off some man's medical bills. Nobody splits a single dollar down the middle to keep a lie breathing.

"I haven't slept five hours a night in months," I said. "I dream about you getting better. You already knew that. You knew all of it. Didn't you."

Something fractured behind his face. His eyes went red. He nodded.

A year. A one-room walk-up half an hour from the nearest train. He'd watched me drag myself home in pieces, watched me ration every cent, watched me bleed for an illness he'd written himself into.

The whole time, he'd stood over it like a god.

Watching. Cold.

Chapter 2

"I'll wire something to your account. Call it compensation."

He kept his head down. Guilt all over him, and under it something close to panic, a man who's run out of script and knows it.

"This is on me. I'm sorry."

I pulled the receipt out of my pocket. Crumpled, almost two feet of it, both sides crammed with the most expensive things on the menu.

I balled it up and threw it at his chest as hard as I could.

He didn't dodge. Just stood there in that sad, sorry look like it was a coat he could wear.

The AC breathed cold across the room. Somewhere past the cicadas, footsteps. Then a voice, sweet and put-on.

"Cas, is the food not here yet? I'm starving."

We both turned.

A girl came down the hall in a thin silk slip, one strap loose off her shoulder. She hadn't bothered to cover the marks on her throat. She wasn't trying to.

Caspian moved fast to get in front of her. "Why are you out here? Go back in. I'll only be a minute."

She went around him anyway, smiling at me with a flicker of recognition and something colder underneath it.

"And this is...?"

Nobody answered.

She liked that. She let the silence stretch, then hooked her arm through his and leaned in like her bones had gone soft, settling, claiming.

His eyes cut to me, uneasy.

I looked away and closed my eyes for a second. My hair was glued to my face with sweat. My pulse knocked against my temple, once, twice.

I'm not slow. I knew exactly what I was looking at.

I'd thought I was just the unlucky girl in some rich kid's slumming game.

Turns out I was the seasoning in his little love story too.

I picked up my delivery bag to leave.

"Wait." Her voice stopped me. "You're his off-campus girlfriend, aren't you. His little charity case. I didn't even recognize you out of the uniform."

A pause, savoring it.

"Quinn Vale. College of Liberal Arts. The brilliant one."

I turned back and looked at her.

It took me half a minute to place the face. Cordelia Ashford. A year ahead of me. Beautiful, connected, the kind of girl a whole room rearranges itself around.

We had history. She'd pulled strings to get my need-based scholarship handed off to someone else, which was the reason I'd never learned to grovel for her the way the rest of them did.

She felt me go still and tightened her grip on his arm. Then she smiled, bright and poisonous.

"Cas, can you believe it. Last year I complained, just once, that there was this fake-humble little underclassman I couldn't stand. You asked me a couple of questions about her. And then you actually went and handled her for me."

Her eyes flicked over me, head to foot.

"I have to give it to you. So clever. Clever enough to take the pride of our whole program and walk her in circles on a leash for a year." A soft laugh. "And the best part? She paid for the whole thing herself. Right down to the last delivery."

A leash.

A year of my life, and it had never once been about me. I was a favor. An errand someone ran to make her smile.

And I'd paid the bill myself. Every cent.

Chapter 3

Cordelia leaned in and kissed his cheek, a little reward for how completely she'd played me, her eyes on mine the whole time, daring me to make a sound.

Then her face changed. Something feverish crept into it.

"Quinn. Did Caspian ever tell you he has depression?"

I frowned. I didn't deny it.

She doubled over laughing.

What came out of her mouth next ran through me like ice water.

"That's because I'm the one who told him about you. That you'd lost a brother to it. Depression." A bright little smile. "I said, all he has to do is say he has it too, and she'll be too stupid not to fall for it." She opened her hands. "And here we are. Right on cue."

For one second the air stopped. Just the cicadas.

Something behind my eyes went white.

I bit down hard, dragged the delivery helmet off my head, and swung it at him with everything in me.

If I swallowed this, I would never be able to face myself again.

My chest was heaving. I could hear myself screaming.

"Depression? You faked depression? You went looking for the rawest place in me and pressed your thumb straight into it?"

"I worked myself down to nothing. For a year. For a sickness you put on like a costume."

"And the bait was my brother. You knew what I lost. You knew, and you used him to reel me in."

"Don't you ever say his name. Go to hell. Both of you, go straight to hell."

I swung again, at his face, before either of them could move.

My breath came in pieces. Months without sleep tilted the floor under me.

The second Cordelia said my brother's name, the last thread I'd been holding all afternoon snapped clean through.

He was the one place no one got to touch.

Caspian never raised a hand. Not once. Cordelia hauled me back by the arm while he stood there with his palm clamped over his mouth, blood slipping between his fingers.

"Cas, are you okay? I'm calling the police. This lunatic actually put her hands on you. I'll have my father"

He caught her wrist and shook his head.

"Don't. Leave it." A breath. "I owe her. All of it."

He smoothed the hair I'd knocked loose, got up, and crossed to me. He took a black card out of his pocket and held it out.

"The PIN's your birthday. There's no fixing this, I know. I'm sorry."

I laughed, short and cold. When I looked at him there was nothing left in me but ice.

I pulled the card out of his fingers. A hundred and ten thousand dollars sitting on it, locked behind my own birthday.

"Hope she was worth it."

I walked out and left him bleeding on that beautiful floor.

I quit the next morning, the second my last check cleared.

The apartment we'd shared shrank back into what it really was. Two hundred and fifty square feet, the whole of it visible from the door. Nothing in it worth turning around for.

Chapter 4

We'd moved out of the dorms together because his depression was getting worse, he said. He wanted me with him every day.

I'd had my guard up when he first came at me. But he had the same sickness I'd watched take my brother, and that was all it took. Something in me went soft. Went stupid.

I never could tell what I actually felt for him. Love, or just the need to make up for a brother I couldn't save, aimed at the first person who'd let me try. All I knew was that I wanted to fix him, past all reason, like pulling him back from the edge might loosen the grip of the nightmare I couldn't outrun.

A year leaves you with a lot of things. The matching ones, the his-and-hers ones, were the ones I couldn't look at. So I dumped all of it in the trash.

I lay there listening to the old AC wheeze, staring at the ceiling, and for the first time in a year I let the exhaustion pull me under.

The dream found me again.

In it, my brother never wakes up.

I've had this one more times than I can count. He's there and not there. No warmth. No sound. None of the small things that made him him. I keep waiting for his lashes to lift, for him to rub one eye and ask me, half asleep, when I'm finally coming to bed.

He doesn't. He never does. Not anymore.

Before he went, he wiped every conversation off his phone. He left me one short apology and moved every last dollar he had into my account. Three thousand five hundred sixty-nine dollars and eighty-one cents. His whole world, down to the change.

It was a bright, full spring when he left, the best the season ever gets. I've been stuck in that spring ever since.

A plastic bag rustled by the door and dragged me back up.

Someone was crouched over the trash, going through it, quick and quiet.

"Who's there."

He froze, then turned around slow.

Caspian. A mask on, a few bandages where the helmet had caught his face. I pressed a hand to my aching forehead and remembered, too late, that he still had a key.

Everything I'd thrown out that afternoon, the matching rings, the his-and-hers mug, a watch, he'd dug back out and lined up on the floor in a neat little row.

"What do you want with those."

He looked down. I couldn't read him.

"Just came to take a few things with me. Last time."

"Junk." I sat up. "The Sinclair heir, on his knees in my trash for junk."

He was holding the cheap silver ring, his thumb moving over it, slow.

"Quinnie. I know you won't believe me. But it was real." His voice dropped. "You were the one house that ever left a light on for me. And I tore it down to the foundation, on purpose, for a game. I've been standing in the rubble ever since, telling myself it'll rebuild if I just don't leave." His thumb stopped on the ring. "It won't. I know. I'm not asking you to come back. I'm asking you to let me carry the bricks. Even from here."

I scanned the room for anything else worth taking. I was going back to the dorms. I'd give this place up by the end of the week.

I dropped my head and laughed at the floor. The afternoon came back, ugly and clear.

"Real. So out of love, you had me drive over the dinner for after you two were done. Should I have thanked you for the tip?"

"Cordelia, I can explain. Nothing happened with her, not really. I said yes to her on a whim, ages ago, and I've wanted out of it for months." He took a step. "I've known for a while now who I actually"

Chapter 5

"There's no point talking about this."

I cut him off, my voice flat, my eyes flatter.

In the bathroom the faucet was still dripping into the bucket. The tap sat knee-high and had leaked for years; I kept a bucket under it to save on the water bill. The savings came to almost nothing. Love that isn't real sounds ridiculous said out loud.

The second the lie cracked open, real or not, a gap had opened between us that nothing was ever going to cross.

"Here's a thought, Caspian. When you used my dead brother to get close to me, did it ever occur to you that a thing like that comes back around? Straight at the person who threw it."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

I didn't answer. I opened the door and waited for him to use it.

He read the finish in my face. Something flinched in him. He swept the little row of keepsakes off the floor into his bag and stood.

"Stop pretending to be sick," I said. "Every person like you who fakes it makes the stigma worse. Makes it harder for the ones who really have it to get anyone to believe them."

One more person like my brother, slipping through cracks nobody bothered to close.

After a moment, he nodded.

Then he pulled a bag of short ribs out from behind the door. He'd seen the message I'd sent earlier, about dinner.

"Will you make the soup for me. One last time."

"No. Your family's chef does it better."

"I only like yours."

"Quinnie. Why can't you trust me, just once. Give me one more chance."

His voice broke on the last word.

I had never once pictured Caspian, the untouchable prince of his family, wearing a face like that. None of it fit the script of the broke-boyfriend game anymore.

True or not, I stood there and felt nothing move in me.

He understood. His hand lifted toward mine, then fell back.

At the door he stopped, his eyes rimmed red, and looked back at me.

"Do you still love me?"

The word sat in my throat a second too long before I let it out flat. "No."

"Could you ever love me again?"

Somewhere under my ribs something pulled toward yes. I kept my hands still at my sides and didn't let it reach my face.

"No."

After he left, I started packing the apartment up. I was going back to school the next week.

Sometime past midnight I sank onto the couch, and my eyes landed on a box in the corner of the closet.

Locked.

My brother's things. What was left of them.

We were twins. After our parents split, they each built new families, new lives. The two of us were the expensive mistake nobody wanted to pay for and nobody wanted to look back at. From middle school on, it was him and me and the bare minimum of child support, holding each other up.

The ache rose under my ribs. I had a small jewelry box gripped in both hands.

He'd given it to me for my birthday, the year he left. A little star pendant, set with chips of diamond. He'd grinned ear to ear and fastened it around my neck himself.

"I bought this with my own money, sis. You like it? It looks incredible on you. Better than any model."

"It's not expensive. But I'm going to work hard, and one day I'll put every beautiful stone in the world on you."

That earnest face. I poked the single dimple in his cheek and nodded, and let myself believe, for a second, that things might turn out okay.

I believe you. So I've been waiting.

Chapter 6

Under the foam lining of the jewelry box, something rattled when I moved it. I peeled the foam back and found a key.

It hadn't been there two years ago, when he gave me the box. He'd slipped it in later.

I held it a moment, then looked at the battered box in the corner of the closet, the paint worn off its edges.

The lock gave.

Four things inside.

An oil painting, sunflowers, every one of them withered. A record from his favorite band, Lowlight. A diary. And a slip of paper with a username and a password.

I picked up the diary, black-covered, and set it on my knees.

The early pages were nothing. Small days. Which girl had confessed to him that week.

That tracked. My brother was lovely, fair, with those pretty heavy-lidded eyes and a way of holding himself just out of reach. I'd been intercepting his love notes since we were kids. But maybe because we'd been thrown out together so young, none of that attention ever seemed to land on him. He stayed delicate. Easily cut. The kind of boy who keeps a diary.

At Wexley, that voice of his made him the lead singer of the campus band overnight, a row of girls screaming his name at every show.

I was sinking into it, the memory of him, when my finger stopped on a page.

Cordelia's name was in the diary.

And after that page, again. Then more. Closer and closer together.

I'd known going back to campus wouldn't be pretty. After I put a helmet to Caspian's face, Cordelia was never going to let it lie.

I just hadn't expected it this fast.

My bed was buried under delivery bags and torn-open packaging. On the desk underneath, in red paint: HOMEWRECKER. WHORE.

Hazel hovered beside me, helpless. She was about the only person in my year I was still on decent terms with.

"Quinn, I tried to stop them. The older girls. It didn't help." She took a fistful of trash out of my hands, guilty. "They said you'd gone after someone you shouldn't have."

I gave her a small smile and kept clearing the bed.

"Also, did you see the campus app?" She hesitated. "They're saying you broke up Cordelia and the guy half the school's in love with. Hundreds of comments. Some of it has receipts. Is any of it true?"

I stopped wiping down the mattress, took her phone, and scrolled.

Mostly photos of me and Caspian on campus together. Screenshots of Cordelia and Caspian, going back to freshman summer, even though they'd never made it official.

So that was the play. Drag the real timeline out now, sell them as the established couple, make me the girl who wormed in.

I didn't answer Hazel's question. I thought for a second, then took out my phone and called Cordelia.

She picked up on the third ring.

"It's Quinn Vale. Three o'clock, Northgate Coffee. I'll be there."

The noise on her end cut out. Then a scoff.

"Oh, the great Quinn Vale wants to apologize now? Little late. I don't burn afternoons on charity cases with no"

"It's about Theo."

Chapter 7

Whatever filth Cordelia had loaded up to spit, that killed it.

A long pause. Then, from her end:

"Fine."

Three o'clock light isn't noon light, but it still came down mean.

I stirred the latte in front of me and took a small sip, turning over the scraps about Cordelia I'd pulled from the diary.

The bell over the caf door rang. Heels crossed the floor and stopped in front of me.

A blue-and-white slip dress. It was the first time I'd looked straight at her face. Small, pretty features, cute, even, and underneath them a habitual something vicious that didn't match the wrapping.

I dropped my eyes and swallowed. Still turned my stomach.

She sat, set her designer bag down, and got to it.

"What about Theo?"

I didn't bother warming up.

"You were in love with him."

Her hand stopped on the menu. The pale lavender of her manicure went white at the tips. Grief crossed her face and she buried it in under two seconds.

"Where did you hear that. Why would I want some broke. Don't be ridiculous." Same arrogance as always. The smile didn't sit right on it.

"His diary. You're all through it. He wrote that you confessed to him twenty-seven times."

I set the spoon down slow and looked at her in a way that didn't leave room to argue.

Her pupils shrank. Her mouth opened, then closed. In the end she didn't deny it. She propped her forehead on one hand, dropped her eyes, and stopped looking at me.

The dodging put an edge on my nerves. I lifted the painting off the seat beside me and set it on the table between us.

His. The withered sunflowers. The one I'd had framed.

"So. You loved him, and you still copied his work and passed it off as your own. You still got his competition slot killed." My voice didn't move. "Painting and singing were the only things that were ever really his. You know what that contest meant to him."

Ten days after this painting was taken out from under him, he was gone.

And the girl who took it was sitting across from me.

She turned her head. Her eyes found the framed canvas, and something dark climbed up out of her.

"Even now. He's gone, and you still come around to play his family."

"Cordelia." I watched her. "The way you loved him"

Her chest heaved, all at once, right at the lip of control. The word love, said out loud, seemed to go into her like a blade.

Chapter 8

Cordelia smashed her cup on the floor and shot to her feet, eyes red, screaming down at me.

"What would you know? You're his sister, so what? What do you actually know about him? Who are you to question how I felt about him?"

"Yes. I loved him. The first person I ever loved like that, and I gave him everything I had. I bought out ten copies of his favorite band's record. I didn't know what sneakers he liked, so I bought every brand and handed them over. His stupid shooter games made me sick to watch and I learned them from nothing anyway, just to have one thing to talk to him about. Money, heart, all of it, I held up to him on my knees."

"What would you know. When have I ever been that small. He turned me down twenty-seven times and it was fine, it was, I could've kept going, because I really, really loved him."

She was sobbing now, her voice scraped to nothing, sinking back into the seat, looking at me like the floor had gone out of the world.

And the thing is, it tipped something over in me too. The truth made less sense, not more.

"Then why," I said. "Why copy his work. Do you know he didn't make it ten days past that contest?"

"Do you know what it took to break him? That he's never coming back? Tell me you weren't one of the people who pushed him there."

My breath snagged. For a second the old nightmare swam back up and I had to hold it under.

She didn't answer. Her lips moved on nothing. Her eyes were just lost.

She dug a cigarette out of her bag, hands shaking, and a barista stopped her before she could light it. She crushed it slowly between her fingers instead.

"That weekend," she said, "he went to a showcase I'd told him about. A big one. He came back wrong. Like someone else was wearing him. When I asked how it went, he looked at me like he wanted me dead. Said I was the most disgusting person he'd ever known. Called me things I won't repeat."

"I still see his face when I close my eyes. Pointing at me. You have no idea what that did to me. Like all the air left the room at once. I didn't know what had happened. I only knew my dad said there'd be scouts there, that it was the chance of a lifetime, so I passed it to him. And he came back and threw me away like a sentence handed down."

"I have my pride too. He didn't want me, fine. But why make it a humiliation. After that I let it go. I even wanted to"

She couldn't get the rest out.

She didn't have to. Love that goes nowhere curdles into something else. A girl handed the whole world wanting the one thing she couldn't buy, couldn't earn, couldn't win no matter what she set on her knees. So she'd burn it down instead.

That covered the hate. The stolen scholarship. Caspian, pointed at me like a weapon. All of it runoff from a grief she'd never put down.

But none of it was the thing that broke him.

Something happened at that showcase. Something that turned a boy who loved to sing into a boy the world lost ten days after a painting was stolen. Cordelia didn't know what it was.

Neither did I. Not yet.

Chapter 9

"How do you even know about me and Theo?"

"He worshipped you. His big sister." Her voice had gone flat and strange. "He hid everything from you except the good news. Couldn't stand the thought of you worrying over him for a second. Honestly? I envied you. Being the one he cared about that much."

The ice in her cup had melted down. A little latte had run over the rim.

I rubbed the calluses on my palm and thought of his handwriting, those neat, almost delicate letters.

"I read the diary he left."

"So... did he hate me the whole time. Or did he ever feel anything for me. Even a little."

"That's not mine to answer for him."

The light went out of her face. Even the hatred drained off it.

In the diary, in the run of pages where he tore into Cordelia, the showcase turned up. And after it, the entries changed. They stopped being ordinary highs and lows.

They became page after page of the same words.

PRESTON ASHFORD. DIE.

The pen had gone through the paper in places. Every stroke looked like it wanted to shred the man underneath it. A hatred I don't have words for.

But he never wrote anything else. Just the name. Just die. No reason. No detail. Nothing I could use.

I looked up at her, sitting there hollowed out.

"Last question."

"Preston Ashford. He's your father, isn't he. The one on the university's board."

Cordelia came back from wherever she'd gone, thrown by a question that had nothing to do with anything. But she nodded.

"Yes. He's my dad."

It kept climbing on the campus app. On the walk back to the dorms, people turned to look and murmured as I passed. I was so far inside my own head about Theo that when someone shouldered me hard, on purpose, I didn't even react.

A body stepped into my path.

"You blind? Watch where you're going." Caspian, ball cap pulled low, snapping it at the guy who'd hit me.

Heads turned. Someone lifted a phone and took our picture, both faces.

"The homewrecker and her boy. The nerve, out walking together."

"No shame at all."

I ignored them and frowned at him.

"What are you doing here."

He looked down, worry in it. "I already posted. Cleared your name, said you didn't know anything. I just kept thinking someone would come at you. Like that."

I rolled my aching shoulder and gave him a look. As if he'd forgotten who'd brought all of this down on my head in the first place.

He hesitated. "Have you been okay these last few"

He didn't finish. A rock came fast, straight at me.

He felt it half a second before I did and stepped in front of me. A guy in a denim jacket folded back into the crowd and was gone.

He'd moved in time, but the rock still caught his cheek. Blood welled up.

He pressed a hand to it, the corner of his mouth tugging, his eyes cutting to me. Like he was waiting, on purpose, to be comforted.

I let out a breath and kept my voice low.

"Caspian. Don't bother. There's no version of this where we happen."

"Whatever you do, I'm not turning around."

Chapter 10

Whatever hope had still been in his eyes went all the way out.

Then, like he was talking himself down off a ledge: "I'm not giving up."

"What is it you think you're holding onto." I didn't get it. A person who'd played someone's real feelings, still gnawing on his own guilt instead of moving on to the next mark.

"I've never hurt like this. Never been this sorry about anything in my life. It's unfamiliar." He said it plainly. "All I know is I love you and I owe you, both at once. So seeing you, doing something for you, it hurts a little less."

The cheap silver ring on his finger caught the streetlight and threw back a thin, cheap shine. Like our year. A mistake, and not even an expensive one.

The post that called me a homewrecker got taken down by whoever wrote it, late that night. The wall of abuse under it, gone by morning. After that, Cordelia left me alone.

Things went quiet again. Except for Caspian, every single day, wearing a groove in my nerves.

Another night I couldn't sleep.

I logged into the account from the slip of paper in his box.

His art account. Over three hundred thousand followers. In that little corner of the world, a real name. His handle was Winterbloom.

He'd had the gift since we were kids, drawing, music. I never could give him the schooling he deserved, not on what the two of us had, and he lit up anyway, bright as the room would let him.

I scrolled back through the old posts.

The early work was soft. Small furred animals. Open country.

Then, at the same place everything else turned, the spring of his freshman year, right after the showcase, the work changed.

The little animals became huge dark things. Swallowing him. Tearing him apart.

It had all gone so fast. From the day I noticed the antidepressants to the day he was gone was barely two months. He was raw that whole stretch, quick to anger, never steady. I reached for him again and again and got the door shut in my face. I didn't know what to do, so I let him have his space.

After he left, I needed a reason so badly I could hardly breathe. But every way I turned it, the answer people handed me was the same.

"You hear about Theo Vale, the one from the art school? They say he did it himself, a while back. Depression."

"Seriously?"

"Why do you think the school's been running all those counseling sessions? That's what they're for."

Two girls, ahead of me on the path, the day I came home from burying him.

So I went numb, and I gave in. After a while I even let myself believe that was the whole of it, and stopped reaching for any other version.

And then his things pried the lid back off.

I came back to myself. My roommate's breathing, in and out, uneven in her sleep.

My hand paused on the mouse. I opened the messages on his account.

Mostly fans. Where's the next one. Come back.

Right after he went quiet there'd been floods of them, every day. But he'd been gone two years. Almost nobody remembered Winterbloom anymore.

Almost.

Chapter 11

Then I found an account. The avatar was a winter landscape. The handle was quietbrook.

Two solid years of messages, every one of them sent after Theo was gone. Confessions. Crying. Things she couldn't let go of, things she wished she'd done.

Somewhere in them I worked out she was a Wexley student too.

The most recent one read:

quietbrook: [Theo, I'm sorry. I found out the truth, and I still can't get you justice.]

While I was reading it, the gray avatar lit up. She'd come online.

I sent a message.

Me: [This is Quinn Vale. I'm his sister. Can we meet?]

A few seconds later:

quietbrook: [Okay.]

She picked the quad, late, the open field at the center of campus.

Noelle was in a black dress, and the second she saw me, something came up in her dull eyes like a light going on. She knew me on sight.

I knew her too. No mistaking it, that small mole between her brows.

She'd been a class officer in Theo's high school class. Once, she'd asked me to pass him a gift, a guitar tab she'd copied out by hand, the chords to his favorite English song, "Late August." I remembered her because of all the things people gave him, his eyes only ever lit up for that one.

It was the one he loved.

She sat down beside me on the grass and watched a ring of freshmen across the field, singing, and the corner of her mouth lifted.

"I used to sit right here. Watching Theo sing." Her voice was soft, small. "The crowd around him then was so much bigger than that. I'd have to look all the way around, a full circle, just to find one angle where I could see the side of his face."

For a second it was two years ago and he was at the center of that field, a guitar over his knee, singing something he'd written.

Then the noise rose around us, and the light in her face went down with it.

"I have so many regrets." Her throat caught. "Six years I've been in love with him. I followed him all the way here, to Wexley. And I never once told him to his face. Not before he was gone."

"If he'd known. If he'd just known there was one more person in the world who loved him, maybe he'd have had one more reason to stay."

I lifted a hand to her shoulder to steady her, and felt how little was left of her. She'd worn down to almost nothing. Bone.

She looked back toward the crowd, and then something shifted behind her eyes, and her face went still and cold.

"Do you know a man named Preston Ashford? He sits on the board."

My brow jumped. I nodded.

"He's the reason Theo's dead."

"That showcase, freshman spring. I was there. Afterward I wanted to catch him, finally tell him how I felt, and instead I watched him get into Ashford's car with the rest of his band."

"Ashford told him a label was interested. That they wanted to sign him. That it was only a dinner."

"And after that"

The words shook coming out of her. The night wind caught the hem of her dress, and I could feel how hard her whole body was shaking. She wrapped her arms around herself and couldn't stop the tears.

Chapter 12

"After Theo died, I kept digging into Ashford. Quietly. My gut wouldn't let it go." Her voice was thin. "I knew he ate with the board crowd at the same place. The Belvedere."

"So I got a job there. Part-time. Two years. Two whole years. And one night, drunk, he finally said enough out loud."

She bent to dig her phone out of her bag, too fast, and a pill bottle dropped onto the grass.

I went still. Then I saw the label, and the bridge of my nose started to burn.

I knew exactly what that bottle was for. Theo had taken the same thing. I'd bought it for Caspian.

Her thin hand shook as she pulled up a recording and pressed an earbud into my palm.

At first it was just noise. A few men, oiling each other up, the way men like that do.

Then a low voice came in under it

"This last one they sent over did nothing for me