Chapter 2 Number One on Her List

Zara POV

The mall trip lasted three hours and solved nothing.

Zara bought a lip balm she did not need and listened to Naomi talk about a boy from her chemistry class and smiled at all the right moments. She was good at that. Showing up just enough that nobody noticed she was somewhere else in her head.

By the time they got back to the Maddox house, the afternoon sun was sitting low and heavy. Naomi dropped onto the porch swing and pulled out her phone. Zara sat on the step beside her and did the same.

Two minutes of scrolling. Three. Normal. Fine.

Then Naomi made a sound. Not quite a laugh. More like the noise you make when something is so predictable it stops being funny.

"She did not," Naomi said, turning her phone screen around.

Zara looked.

It was a video. Jade Okafor, sitting in what looked like her bedroom, lip gloss perfect, camera angle just right. The title across the top of the post read: MY SUMMER GOALS 🔥 in big bold letters.

Zara hit play.

Jade's voice was sweet, the way syrup is sweet, too much of it made your teeth hurt. She listed her goals one by one. A beach trip. New shoes. A 4.0 GPA. And then she paused, smiled slowly, and held up her phone to show a photo.

Eli Maddox. Younger, maybe seventeen, in a football jersey, mid-laugh, looking like someone had taken the picture without him knowing.

"Goal number one," Jade said to the camera. "Him."

The comment section underneath was a wall of fire emojis and screaming. Get him, girl. He's so fine. Good luck, Jade, you're gonna need it. He literally went to college. He's too old for you. Doesn't matter; look at him.

Naomi rolled her eyes so hard it looked like it hurt. "She posted a photo of my brother. My actual brother. Like a trophy."

"It's just a video," Zara said.

"She does this every summer. Picks someone and makes it a whole performance." Naomi locked her phone and tossed it beside her. "Eli's going to hate this when he sees it."

Zara looked back at her own screen. The photo of Eli was still there in the comments, shared and re-shared. She scrolled past it.

She felt nothing.

She told herself that.

She felt nothing.

She told herself that again.

A third time, just to be sure.

It did not get more convincing.

She locked her phone and looked at the yard instead. The old oak tree in the corner. The broken mailbox. Normal things. Real things. Things that had nothing to do with dark eyes and eggs she had not asked for.

The front door opened behind them.

Eli stepped out onto the porch with his phone pressed to his ear. He did not look at either of them. His jaw was tight, and his shoulders were up near his ears, the posture of someone trying to take up less space while also holding something very heavy.

"I told you I needed more time," he said into the phone. His voice was low. Careful. The kind of care meant he was working hard to keep it steady. "Dad, I'm not just listening for one second."

He stopped. Whatever the other person said made the muscle in his jaw jump.

"Fine," he said quietly. Just that word. Then he pulled the phone down, ended the call, and stood there for a moment with his back to both of them.

Naomi had gone still on the swing.

Eli turned around. His face was completely closed now. Every door shut. Every window is dark. He sat down on the porch railing across from them and looked out at the yard, and said nothing.

Naomi opened her mouth.

He shook his head once. Small. Don't.

She closed her mouth.

Zara understood that. The do n't-ask face. The please-just-act-normal face. The I-am-holding-it-together-by-a-thread-and-if-you-pull-it-I-will-fall-apart face.

She knew that face. She had worn it for two years running. Every time someone asked about her dad. Every time there was a school form that said parent/guardian,n and she had to decide which box to tick with her mom working a double shift and her dad somewhere that was not here.

She looked at Eli sitting on that railing, ng staring at nothing, and felt something shift in her chest. Something quiet and warm and completely inconvenient.

Naomi stood up and said she was going inside to get snacks, which was Naomi's way of giving people space without saying she was giving them space. She disappeared through the front door, and the porch went quiet.

Zara stared at her phone screen. It was off. She was staring at her own reflection in the black glass.

She should go inside, too. That was the smart thing. That was the correct thing. She and Eli were strangers. He had made her eggs and said seven words to her, and that was the total sum of what they were.

She stayed.

She did not mean to watch him. She was just sitting there, and he was right there, re and she could not help noticing the way he exhaled slowly like he was letting something go that would not actually leave. The way his hands rested on the railing, but his knuckles were tight. The way he was looking at the yard, but not seeing it at all.

She recognized every single piece of it.

She recognized it the way you recognize a song you heard a long time ago. You did not remember learning it. You just knew all the words.

She must have looked for too long. Because he turned.

His eyes found hers immediately. Like he already knew she was there.

Zara did not look away fast enough.

"Stop looking at me like that," he said.

His voice was quiet. Not mean. Not sharp. Just quiet in a way that felt serious.

Her heart jumped. "Like what?"

He held her gaze for one beat. Two.

"Like you understand."

The words landed slowly. One at a time.

She did not know what to say. She did not know how to explain that she was not trying to read him, but she just knew the look because she had lived inside it. She did not know how to tell a near-stranger that without it sounding like too much.

She opened her mouth.

The front door swung open, and Naomi came back with three sodas and a bag of chips and started talking immediately about something she had seen on her phone, and the moment broke apart like glass on a tile floor.

Clean gone.

But Eli did not look away for another full second.

And when he finally did, something about the way he turned slowly, almost reluctantly,t made Zara's hands go still in her lap.

Like you understand.

She pressed her lips together and looked straight ahead.

She understood perfectly. That was exactly the problem.