Chapter 6 Sophie
Author's POV
"Okay, you need to explain this to me right now, because I have been sitting on this couch for two hours just waiting for you to walk through that door."
Gabriella barely had her key out of the lock before Sophie was already talking, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her phone in her hand and a look on her face like she had been saving up energy all day just for this moment.
"Explain what," Gabriella said, dropping her bag by the door.
"Don't play dumb with me, Walker." Sophie held up her phone, the screen glowing. "The video. It's at four thousand views now. Four thousand! Do you know how big that is for our school?"
Gabriella groaned and flopped down onto her own bed across the small room. "Please tell me you are joking."
"I wish I was." Sophie was grinning so wide it looked like her face might crack. "Okay but seriously, the line. The bike line. 'It's broken but it still gets me somewhere, you're just pretty and empty.' Gabriella. That is iconic. People are making edits of it."
"Edits?"
"Like videos. With music. Someone put sad piano music behind Vanessa's face right after you said it and it has like six hundred likes already."
Gabriella pressed her hands over her face and groaned into her palms. "This is a nightmare."
"This is a legend being born," Sophie said, completely unbothered. "Do you understand how many people have wanted to say something like that to Vanessa Monroe for years? You did it. On camera. In front of Ethan Carter."
"She slapped me, Sophie."
"And you did not even flinch." Sophie leaned forward, her voice softer now, but still just as warm. "Everyone at that school treats you like you're some scandal walking around campus. Like you're something to whisper about. But you're not a scandal. You stood up to the two richest, meanest people at Saint Joseph and you did not even blink. That's not embarrassing. That's kind of amazing."
Gabriella lowered her hands and looked at her roommate. Sophie meant every word of it, she could tell. There was no teasing in her voice, no hidden judgment. Just genuine warmth, like she actually believed what she was saying.
It was the first time since the crash that Gabriella felt something other than exhaustion or anger sitting there in her chest.
"Thanks," she said quietly.
"Don't thank me, it's just facts." Sophie flopped backward onto her own bed, staring at the ceiling. "Okay, but tell me about the tutoring thing. How was it? Was he as annoying in person as he is in the hallway?"
Gabriella sat up, pulling her knees to her chest. "Worse. He showed up twenty minutes late, didn't apologize, and spent the whole first fifteen minutes on his phone."
"Classic rich boy behavior."
"But then…" Gabriella stopped herself.
Sophie's head popped up off the pillow immediately. "But then what?"
"Nothing." Gabriella looked away, suddenly very interested in the edge of her blanket.
"Gabriella Walker. But then what?"
"He actually tried," Gabriella said finally. "After I told him off, he actually put his phone down and worked through the problems. He got one right on the third try and he looked like he wanted to smile about it, but he stopped himself."
Sophie was quiet for a second, which was rare for her. Then a slow grin spread across her face. "Oh my god."
"What?"
"You noticed that. You noticed the little almost-smile thing."
"I noticed he's not as stupid as I thought," Gabriella said quickly. "That's it. He understood the material fast once he stopped performing arrogance for whoever was watching."
"Uh huh." Sophie's grin only got wider. "Sure. That's all it was."
"Sophie."
"I'm just saying, you don't usually talk about people like that. Full sentences. Details. Almost-smiles." Sophie sat up, hugging her pillow to her chest, looking way too pleased with herself. "You like him."
"What the fuck? I do not like him," Gabriella said, throwing a spare pillow across the room, which Sophie caught easily and hugged even tighter. "I tolerate him. There's a difference."
"Whatever helps you sleep at night," Sophie said, laughing.
They talked for another hour after that, about nothing important, about Sophie's classes and the awful cafeteria food and a boy in her chemistry class who kept staring at her, and for a little while, Gabriella almost forgot about the video, the whispers, the scholarship review hanging over her head.
Almost.
Later that night, long after Sophie had fallen asleep, her soft snoring the only sound in the room, Gabriella lay awake staring at the ceiling.
She could not stop thinking about everything. The video. The principal's office. The way Ethan had looked at her like nobody had ever spoken to him honestly before. The unknown number that had texted her outside the study room.
She reached under her pillow and pulled out an old photograph, worn soft from being touched too many times over the years.
Her father, young, maybe twenty-five, standing beside her grandfather in front of the old Walker Essence factory. Both of them were smiling, her grandfather's arm around her father's shoulders, bottles of perfume lined up behind them on a shelf like trophies.
It was the only physical thing she had left from the company that used to be everything to her family. Everything else had been sold, seized, or destroyed years ago.
She traced her finger over her grandfather's face gently, like she could somehow reach back through the photo and touch him.
"One day you'll discover the truth," she whispered, repeating the words her father had said to her more times than she could count, every single time she asked him what really happened to Walker Essence. He never explained further. He just said that line, like it was a promise he was too tired to keep just yet.
She wondered if he even remembered saying it anymore. She wondered if the truth even still existed somewhere, or if it had been buried so deep that nobody would ever be able to dig it back up.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand beside her.
She sat up fast, her heart already pounding before she even looked at the screen.
The same number. The one from outside the study room.
Her hands were not quite steady as she picked up the phone and opened the message.
‘You should already know who is watching you.’
Gabriella stared at the words until they stopped making sense, until they were just letters on a screen instead of a sentence.
Who was watching her? For how long? Since when?
She looked over at Sophie, still asleep, still completely unaware that anything was wrong. She thought about waking her up, showing her the message, asking her what she thought it meant.
But something stopped her. A cold, creeping feeling that whoever was sending these messages already knew more about her life than they should.
And if that was true, then maybe telling someone, even Sophie, even someone she trusted, was exactly the kind of mistake they were counting on her to make.
She set the phone back down on the nightstand, face up, the screen still glowing faintly in the room.
Whoever was out there.
Whoever was watching.
They knew her name. They knew where she went. They knew things about her life that a stranger should not know.
And they wanted her to know it too.
