Chapter 3 First Morning

Avery's POV

.The cottage didn't feel like mine yet, but I woke before my alarm anyway. The ceiling looked different and the light coming through the window hit the wall at an angle I wasn't used to, and everything smelled faintly of lavender and lemon polish like someone had cleaned the place specifically for us and wanted us to know it. I got up and went to the kitchen and found it empty, my mother still asleep in the other bedroom with her breathing slow and deep in the first good rest she'd had in weeks. I filled a mug with coffee from the pot she'd set to brew before she went to bed and opened my laptop at the small kitchen table.

The support page had been updated overnight. I'd seen the new post already, the photo of the cottage and the caption that was still burning somewhere behind my ribs, and I scrolled past it to look at the earlier ones instead. Forty-two comments on the original video post and twenty-seven on the photo someone had taken of me leaving the party, and eleven more on the thread where someone had started a poll that was still running with the numbers changing every time I refreshed. I closed the laptop and stared at the screen of my phone instead, at the text from the unknown number that was still there. Enjoy the new house. I'd looked it up three weeks ago when the first anonymous message appeared, and the carrier wouldn't release the number without a police report and the police wouldn't file a report without proof of harassment and the support page was proof but no one at school cared.

The kettle clicked off and I poured the coffee into the cracked mug I'd found in the cupboard. I'd been stuck on a bug in my game for a week, something in the pathfinding algorithm that kept breaking when the character reached a certain point. I'd re-written the code four times and it still crashed at the same moment, and I opened my laptop again and pulled up the file hoping morning clarity would fix what evening exhaustion couldn't. The code stared back at me, a thousand lines of something I'd built from nothing, and I typed and deleted and typed again while the coffee went cold beside me.

I was so deep in the code that I didn't hear the kitchen door open, and I didn't know anyone else was in the room until a voice said, "You're up early." I looked up and found Jaxon Ryder standing in the doorway of the cottage kitchen like he had every right to be there. He was wearing running clothes and his hair was still wet from a shower, and he looked at me like I'd caught him at something he hadn't planned. "It's four fifty," he said. "My mother told me you might be working in the mornings. I came to get something from the pantry."

The cottage pantry was connected to the main house kitchen, I'd seen the door when we moved in, but I hadn't expected anyone to use it at five in the morning. I hadn't expected him to be here, standing in the space I'd already started thinking of as mine with his arms crossed and his expression carefully neutral. "Your mother told you I might be working," I repeated. "Why would she tell you that?" He shrugged and said she thought I coded, that she was probably trying to make conversation, and the words landed somewhere between my chest and my throat. I didn't want him here and I didn't want him to know anything about me, not what I did in the mornings or what I was building or what kept me awake at night.

"The video," he said, and I felt my spine go rigid. "I know you've seen it. I know what people are saying." I told him I didn't want to talk about that, and he moved toward the pantry door and stopped with his hand on the handle. "I'm not going to pretend I know you," he said. "I don't. But I know what it's like to have people talk about you when you're not there."

I didn't say anything because I didn't know what to say. He was standing in my kitchen at four fifty in the morning telling me he understood something I'd been carrying alone for two months, and I wanted to hate him for it. I wanted to tell him he had no idea what it felt like to lose everything in a single night, to have your scholarship pulled and your reputation shredded by people who didn't even know your name. But he was looking at me with something that looked almost like recognition, and I couldn't make myself push him away. "The video will blow over," he said. "Everything does."

I laughed at that, sharp and hollow, and I watched his face shift in response. "You don't know anything about what I'm going through," I said. "You don't get to stand there and tell me it'll be fine like you've ever been on the other side of something like that." He told me he didn't say it was fine, he said it would blow over, and he walked through the pantry door and closed it behind him. I stared at the empty space where he'd been and tried to figure out what had just happened.

He came back five minutes later with a box of protein bars and stopped at the kitchen door. "I used to have a scholarship," he said. "Athletic. I lost it sophomore year. Injury. The scouts didn't care about the reason. They just cared about the result." He didn't wait for me to respond and he walked out of the cottage and disappeared into the early morning light, and I sat at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold and stared at the code on my screen. I found the bug eleven minutes later, a misplaced condition in the pathfinding algorithm that had been breaking everything else, and I fixed it and the game ran smoothly for the first time in a week. The character reached the final choice and the screen didn't crash, it just waited for me to decide.

I closed the laptop and got ready for school. The support page was still open on my phone and the anonymous post was still there with forty-seven comments and counting, and the text from the unknown number was still burning in my pocket. When I walked into school that morning, I found a printout of the support page taped to my locker with the caption circled in red ink. Enjoy the new house. I stood there for a long moment and then I ripped it down and walked to class without looking at anyone, and I spent the entire day trying to figure out who had access to the east side of the property.