I walk to the car on numb legs, my hand pressed against the scar beneath my collarbone—the pale crescent I have carried my entire life without memory, without understanding that it was evidence of a violence I cannot recall.
Kai sits in the driver's seat with the engine running, not looking at me. I slide in beside him, buckle my seatbelt, and stare through the windshield at a world that has fundamentally shifted.
"You're white as a sheet," he says, and the anger I expected to find in his voice is temporarily shelved, replaced by concern that scrapes against my raw nerves. "What did she say to you in there?"
"Nothing that matters." We both know it is a lie. "Nothing I want to talk about right now."
"Skye, you're shaking." His hand moves toward me, then stops midair, retreating to the steering wheel as if he has remembered we are strangers now. "Your mother pulled you into the hallway for five minutes and you came out looking like you'd seen a ghost."
"Drive," I say, the word barely forming around the tightness in my throat. "Please, just drive."
"Tell me what happened first," he demands.
"I said drive, Kai." My voice cracks on his name, betraying the desperation I am trying to contain. "I cannot sit in this driveway. I cannot be in this house right now. Please, just get me away from here."
He pulls away without another word, and I am grateful for the movement, for the blur of trees and iron gates and wealth sliding past the window.
The car is small, intimate, the silence between us heavy with everything we have not said since the bathroom, since the wall, since I moved the dresser back into place and then moved it again in the dark hours of that sleepless night.
Mansions give way to commercial strips. The academy spires emerge in the distance. I try to find words that will not shatter me further, but language has abandoned me entirely.
Diane's revelation sits in my chest like a stone. My father's violence. My mother's complicity. My own scarred body carrying evidence of a moment I cannot remember.
I want to tell Kai, but my cruelty from last night tangles with the words before they can form. I cannot reconcile the woman who pushed him away with the woman who now wants to reach for his hand.
I open my mouth twice. Close it. The car passes the turn for campus, continues toward the literature building, and I realize we are almost there.
He stops at the last turn, the spot where we will not be seen together by anyone who might ask questions. He kills the engine. I do not move to exit.
"We should talk," I say, and the words rush out before I can catch them, before I can calculate whether they are wise or dangerous or both.
He turns to look at me finally, and his expression is guarded, exhausted, the face of a man who has spent the night bracing for disappointment.
"Should we? Because last night you made it pretty clear that talking was the last thing you wanted to do with me."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?" He laughs, but the sound holds no humor. "You told me I was never part of your plan. You told me you were leaving for California and that whatever this is between us doesn't matter. Those were your exact words, Skye."
"I know what I said." I search for the right words, the precise combination of honesty and protection. "That's what I want to talk about. About last night. About what I said. About—" I gesture helplessly. "—everything."
"Everything." He repeats the word like it tastes foreign. "After you spent the last twelve hours avoiding me, treating me like I'm the enemy."
"You're not the enemy."
"Then what am I?" His voice rises. "One minute you're kissing me, and the next you're telling me I mean nothing. Which one is true?"
"Both," I whisper. "Neither. I don't know."
He stares at me, and I watch the anger shift into resignation.
"I'll agree to talk," he says, and each word falls slowly, measured, weighted with meaning that makes my stomach tighten, "if you've changed your mind about leaving."
I understand what he is asking this way—whether California is still my destination, whether he has become someone I would consider staying for.
I think of the life I constructed from necessity rather than desire. I think of my father hitting my mother, of the inheritance of violence and silence I am only beginning to comprehend.
The truth rises in my throat. I want to stay. I want to try.
But the words will not come. Last night, his bed was cold and empty. I stood in his room surrounded by all those books—the proof of a man he never showed me—and he was somewhere else. With someone else.
Admitting I want to stay feels like surrender, like handing him a weapon I am not certain he will not use.
He says he wants me to fight for this, but where was he fighting last night? In whose bed did he seek comfort after I wounded him?
I cannot give him my honesty when I do not know if he has given me his.
"No," I say, and the lie tastes like truth and ash on my tongue. "I haven't changed my mind."
His jaw tightens. The guarded expression calcifies into a hardness I have not seen before, final as a door slamming shut against light and hope and possibility.
"Then we have nothing to talk about." He starts the engine, the gesture a dismissal that lands in my chest like a blow I cannot deflect. "Get out, Skye. I'll see you at tutoring."
"Kai, please—"
"I said no." He stares through the windshield, not at me, his knuckles white on the steering wheel where they grip with force that must be painful. "You made your choice. You keep making it, over and over, and I won't pretend it doesn't matter."
"It's not that simple."
"It is exactly that simple." His voice drops, quieter but no less devastating. "Either you want to be here with me, or you want to run to California. You cannot have both."
"That's not what you are to me."
"Then tell me what I am." He finally looks at me, and the rawness makes my breath catch. "Tell me I matter enough for you to stay."
The words rise in my throat—yes, you matter, yes, I want to stay—but they tangle with every lesson Travis taught me about vulnerability.
"I can't," I whisper.
"Then get out." His voice is flat, emptied of everything except exhaustion. "Get out of my car, Skye."
I sit frozen, wanting to argue, wanting to explain, wanting to take back the lie and offer the truth instead. But the moment stretches, elongates, becomes impassable.
I gather my bag, my coat, the fragments of my composure. My hand finds the door handle and pulls.
The cold air hits my face as I step out of the car, and I turn back one last time, searching for any sign that he might reconsider, that he might give me one more chance to be brave instead of broken.
He does not look at me.
The engine revs. Tires spin against asphalt. He drives away before I have reached the sidewalk, the car disappearing around the corner with a finality that leaves me standing alone on the curb.
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