Chapter 2 The Four Bars

Declan's POV

I found the photo at eleven forty-seven.

I am not even supposed to be on my phone. I put it face down an hour ago and told myself I was done with the day. New house. New room. New everything. Just sleep and deal with it tomorrow.

Then Fitz sent me a link with zero context and three question marks.

I pick the phone up.

And there we are.

Wren Calloway and I, stepping out of the same door at the same party, her shoulder under my jacket, both of us mid-step like we are going somewhere together. Like we planned it. Like, we are the kind of people who plan things together.

We are not.

We have spoken approximately eleven words to each other since I walked through her front door this morning, and most of them were at dinner, and none of them were nice.

I scroll to the comments.

Okay, but who is he

Wren Calloway has a BOYFRIEND??

The way he's looking at her, though

I stop scrolling.

I go back to the photo.

I am not looking at her. I am looking straight ahead. But the angle of my head, the way my arm is positioned where my jacket crosses her shoulder, it reads like something it absolutely is not, and I cannot explain that to four thousand strangers on the internet at midnight.

I put the phone down.

Pick it up again.

The comment count is at sixty-three.

I get up and sit on the edge of the bed because lying down feels wrong now, like I am pretending to be calm when I am not even close. The room is too quiet. Through the wall, I can hear Wren moving, one sharp sound like she sat up fast, then nothing. She found it too. I know she did. The silence coming through that wall is a completely different kind of silence than it was ten minutes ago. It has weight now.

My dad knocked at ten to say goodnight. I had my eyes closed and kept them that way. I heard him stand in the doorway for a moment, the way he always does, like he is trying to figure out what to say and running out of time to say it. Then he pulled the door mostly shut and walked back down the hall. We have been doing that for two years. Him standing in doorways. Me pretending not to notice.

He thinks moving into this house is a fresh start.

He used those exact words three weeks ago. Fresh start, Dec. You will like her. Her daughter is your age. It will be fine.

It is not fine.

Nothing about this is fine, and the photo currently collecting comments on the Hartwell gossip account is the least fine part of a deeply not fine situation.

I open my composition notebook.

Not because I feel like writing. Because I do not know what else to do with my hands when my brain gets like this, loud and circular and impossible to turn off. I write four bars. They come out angry, all sharp edges and no resolution, the kind of thing that sounds like a door slamming. I look at them for a second and cross them out.

The room smells like fresh paint.

Someone did that. Someone bought the paint, rolled it on the walls, let it dry, and made this room look like it was waiting for a person to arrive. My dad probably asked Lila to do it. Or maybe Lila just did it because she is that kind of person, warm and full of plans, the kind of person who thinks a fresh coat of paint means something.

My mom would have done the same thing.

I write the four bars again. Same notes. Same angry shape. This time, I do not cross them out. I just sit with them.

Here is what nobody tells you about moving into a dead woman's absence. She is not here, but the space where she would have had an opinion about everything, about the paint color, about the new house, about my dad holding someone else's hand at dinner, that space is full. It is the loudest empty I have ever been inside.

I close the notebook.

My phone buzzes.

Fitz again. bro the poll is at seventy-eight percent shipped. You need to explain this to me immediately.

I type back: There is nothing to explain.

He sends back: the internet disagrees.

I put the phone face down again.

Stand up.

Sit down.

Stand up again.

Walk to the door and stop with my hand on the knob because I have absolutely no reason to open it and nowhere to go if I do. I cannot go downstairs because my dad and Lila are still down there. I cannot go anywhere in this house without it meaning something in a house this quiet this late.

I go back to bed.

Through the wall, I hear Wren's voice. Low and fast, like she is talking to someone. But her phone never rang. Which means she is back on her camera, recording something, talking through it the way I write through it. Processing. I recognize the shape of it even through the drywall.

We are more alike than I want to think about.

I pick up the notebook and write something that is not four bars. It is one line. Six words. I do not know where it comes from, but it lands on the page before I can stop it, and when I read it back, I feel it in a place that has been quiet for a long time.

I shut the notebook fast.

Putting it under the mattress like that will do nothing.

Lie back down.

The comment count is at ninety-one when I check again.

Then my phone buzzes with something that is not Fitz.

It is a message from a number I do not have saved.

One line. No greeting. No name.

We need to fix this before Monday, or both of us are going to walk into that school and never walk out the same way again.

I stare at it.

The number has a Hartwell area code.

My door is closed.

Her door is closed.

Two rooms apart in the same dark, quiet house, and Wren Calloway is texting me at midnight like we are already in something together.

My thumbs hover over the screen for a long time.

I do not type back.

But I do not put the phone down either.

And then it buzzes again.

I know you're awake. I can hear your keyboard.