Chapter 2 Something Like Grief

Rowe POV

I've been lied to enough times to know what it looks like.

It looks like eye contact was held a second too long. It looks like a smile that comes too fast. It looks like my father is raising a glass at the dinner table and saying to new beginnings like he didn't spend the last six months planning this marriage the way he plans everything quietly, completely, with the outcome already decided before anyone else knew there was a game.

What I saw on Cael Morrow's face tonight was not a lie.

That's the part I can't shake.

I'm sitting on my bed, back against the headboard, and I can still see it, the second Cael looked up at me, the way his whole face changed. Not embarrassed. Not nervous. Something older than that. Something that looked exactly like the way I felt standing at my mother's grave two years ago, watching the dirt fall and understanding for the first time that some things don't come back.

He looked at me like I was already gone.

I've never met this boy before tonight. He has no reason to look at me like that.

I slide the note I wrote under his door. Stay out of my way. Clean. Simple. It's not a threat, it's a boundary, and I keep my boundaries short so people don't miss them. I go back to my room, and I tell myself the weird, quiet boy with the one duffel bag is not my problem.

I almost believe it.

Almost.

Three hours later, I'm downstairs because I can't sleep, which is not new. The kitchen is dark. I'm standing at the counter drinking water when I hear it, the softest sound, barely there. A pen moving across paper. Coming from the living room, just around the corner.

I don't make a sound. I just look.

Cael is sitting on the floor with his back against the couch and a notebook open across his knees. He doesn't see me. His head is bent, pen moving fast, and whatever he's writing, he's completely inside it. His face is doing something I've never seen on a person his age, this focused, exhausted, private kind of pain. Like someone doing math that has no right answer.

I should go back upstairs.

I lean against the doorframe instead.

That's when he tears the page out. Slowly. Folds it. Pulls back the sleeve of his left arm and for one second I see his wrist, a row of small marks pressed into the skin, tallies, too many, too deliberate, and then the sleeve is back down, and he's tucking the folded page under the couch cushion like he's hiding it from himself.

My chest does something I don't have a name for.

I step back before he looks up. I go upstairs. I get in bed. I stare at the ceiling for an hour, and I think about the marks on his wrist and the look on his face at dinner and the way he knocked over that glass and didn't move, didn't scramble or apologize or perform embarrassment the way people do when they want to be forgiven. He just sat there. Like the water spreading across the table was the least important thing happening to him in that moment.

What was the most important thing?

I fall asleep trying to answer that, and I wake up with it still sitting in the middle of my chest unsolved.

Monday morning. Harken Prep.

I walk in with Vance, who talks the whole drive about nothing, which is why I keep him around. I don't want to think this morning. I want routine. I want the version of my life that runs clean and simple and exactly the way I built it.

I see Cael across the front hall. He's standing near the edge of the entrance crowd, backpack on one shoulder, eyes slightly down, completely still in the middle of forty moving people. Invisible by choice. I can see the effort it takes, the way he controls his posture so nothing about him invites attention.

A guy named Trigg from my year walks past Cael and knocks his shoulder hard enough to move him. Doesn't stop. Doesn't look back. Cael rebalances and keeps walking like it didn't happen. Like it's happened enough times, it doesn't register anymore.

The feeling in my chest gets sharper.

"Who's the new kid?" Vance asks, following my eyes.

"Nobody," I say. "Leave him alone."

Vance looks at me sideways. "I wasn't going to."

"I said leave him alone."

Vance goes quiet. That's another reason I keep him around.

I'm three minutes from first period when I hear Cael's name from behind me. I slow down. Two girls near the lockers are talking too loudly about the new stepbrother moving into the Daltry house, how strange he is, how he said nothing at all on the way in, how Silas must have lost his mind bringing some scholarship nobody into the family.

I should keep walking. This is not my business.

One of them says, "Did you see the way he looked at Rowe at dinner? Like he was seeing a ghost."

I stop walking entirely.

Because that's it. That's exactly it. That's the word I couldn't find last night, lying in the dark, trying to understand what I saw on his face.

Not grief.

Not fear.

He looked at me the way people look at someone when they already know how the story ends.

I turn and walk back down the hall. I find Cael at his locker, and I stop beside him and wait for him to look at me. He does quick, guarded, the way you look at something that might move fast.

"You wrote something down last night," I say quietly. "After dinner."

His face doesn't change. Not a flinch, not a flicker. "I write a lot of things."

"On your floor. After midnight."

A pause. Short but real. "You were watching me."

"I was getting water. The light was on." I hold his gaze. "What were you writing about?"

For one second, just one something moves behind his eyes. Something that looks like the answer is right there, and he's deciding whether to drown it or let it surface. Then it's gone. His jaw sets.

"Homework," he says.

He closes his locker and walks away.

I stand in the empty hallway and watch him go, and I know the way I know things, the way I have always known things before I have proof that Cael Morrow is not writing about homework.

He's writing about me.

And I have absolutely no idea why.

But I'm going to find out.