Chapter 15 Reclaiming the Sky
POV: Zara
Does his sister know yet?
Zara stared at the screenshot until her eyes stopped seeing it as an image and started seeing it as a decision point.
Whoever was on the other end of that number, and she was almost certain now, the way you were certain about things you couldn't yet prove had been outside this house more than once. Had a camera. Had patience. Was building something the same way Zara was building something, except Jade's version ended with Naomi finding out in the worst possible way, from the worst possible source, with the worst possible framing.
Zara did not reply. She added the screenshot to her folder, twelve items now, dates and times note,d and plugged in her phone and lay in the dark and made a list in her head of everything she knew for certain.
One: Jade had been watching this house.
Two: Jade had a deadline. Because Jade had seen the kitchen window photo, which meant Jade knew about August thirty-first, which meant Jade was moving faster now, before summer closed and took the story with it.
Three: Zara had maybe three weeks to figure out how to get ahead of this before it got ahead of her.
She lay there until midnight. Then she got up, very quietly, and went to find out if the roof still belonged to her.
The window at the end of the upstairs hall opened onto a flat section above the kitchen. It was Naomi who'd shown her, freshman year, nobody knew about this except Eli and me, so if you tell anyone, I'll deny it, and Zara had loved it immediately. Not because it was impressive. Because it was the kind of place that required you to want to be there. You had to know it existed. You had to climb out a window. The effort was its own security system.
She brought a book she wasn't going to read. She told herself it was practical something to do with her hands and not a prop for performing cal,m she didn't feel.
The night was warm and still. She settled against the slope of the shingles and looked at the sky and waited to feel something.
What she felt was the absence of him.
She registered it the way you register a missing tooth, not painful exactly, just an awareness of a space that something used to fill. The last time she was up there,e Eli had climbed out the window twenty minutes after her without asking permission and sat a careful distance away, ay, and they had looked at the same sky, and the silence had been the companionable kind, the kind that felt like a conversation.
Tonight, the silence was just quiet.
She opened her book. Read the same paragraph four times. Closed it.
This is your space, she told herself. It was yours before him. It is still yours.
Both things could be true at once. That was what she was testing. Whether something could still belong to you after someone else had been in it.
August thirty-first.
She turned the date over in her mind, the way you turn a stone, examining it from every angle, testing the weight of it. Eighteen days. Eighteen days until his dad expected an answer, until college became a calendar item again, until the summer that had been stretching warm and endless in front of her started looking like what it actually was.
A temporary thing.
She had always known that. She had known it in the kitchen on the first morning,d on the roof the first night, and in every midnight conversation since. She had known it the way you knew a song was going to end while you were still in the middle of it, awareness running underneath the listening, quiet and persistent.
She had just gotten very good at not looking at it directly.
The thing was, and this was the part she had been most carefully not examining, she didn't know what she wanted to happen. She knew what was practical. She knew what was safe. She knew the version of this summer where she kept her distance and kept her walls and went home in September and said yes, it was a good summer and meant it adequately.
She had been building that version from the first morning. And then Eli had made her eggs she didn't ask for and left notes under her door and sat on a roof in the dark and said, " You don't have to be okay and now the version she'd been carefully constructing had a hole in it the exact shape of him.
She pressed her thumb into her palm.
Stop, she told herself.
She looked at the sky. Tried to make it just a sky.
He didn't come.
Forty minutes. Fifty. An hour.
She tracked it in the way she tracked things; she told herself she wasn't tracking peripherally, deniably, with the part of her brain that logged information before she could decide not to want it. Every few minutes, she was aware of the window behind her. Whether it was opening. Of the sounds from inside the house that might be footsteps or might just be the building settling in the heat.
He didn't come.
At some point, she stopped listening for him, which felt like growth, and started actually looking at the sky, which was genuinely good, clear, and dark, more stars than you ever expected over a town this size.
She breathed. Real breaths, the slow kind.
She thought about her mom. About the things she hadn't said on the phone. About the folder on her phone that was now twelve items deep. About Naomi downstairs, asleep and trusting and completely unaware that she was the key in a lock Jade was trying to turn.
She thought about what it meant to be seen. Really seen not performed at, not managed, not strategically included, or deliberately erased. Just looked at it honestly and found it to be enough.
She had spent so long making herself small that she'd forgotten it was a choice. Not a fact about her. A choice she kept making every morning, like it was the only option.
She was starting to wonder what would happen if she stopped.
The window scraped.
She went still.
Footsteps on the shingles were careful, the weight of someone who knew how to move quietly on a sloped surface. She didn't turn around. She counted the steps and knew, by the specific rhythm of them, before he said a word.
She had told herself she'd be relieved if he didn't come.
She had been wrong about that.
"I wasn't going to come up," Eli said, settling beside her. Not close. Respectful of whatever she'd come up here to do. "I saw the light was off in your room."
"That's a low bar for checking on someone," she said.
"I wasn't checking on you." A pause. "I was going to leave you alone up here."
"What changed?"
He was quiet for a moment. She heard him settle more fully against the slope, his shoulder not quite touching hers.
"I got another message," he said. "Different account. Not directed at you this time."
She turned to look at him.
His face in the dark was difficult to read, but his voice had something careful in it, the kind of careful that meant the thing he was about to say was going to land badly.
"At me?" she said.
"At Naomi."
The night air suddenly felt colder.
"Whoever this is," he said quietly, "they're escalating. They sent Naomi a direct message tonight. Anonymous account. I saw it before she died,d she'd left her phone on the kitchen counter."
Zara's chest tightened. "What did it say?"
He held out his phone.
She read it.
Three sentences. That was all. Three sentences, and Zara felt the roof tilt under her, not literally, but the way the ground shifted when something you'd been bracing for finally arrived.
Because it wasn't vague this time. No careful almost-names or deniable details.
This time, it said everything. Her name. Eli's name. What the messages had been about. What the notes said.
All of it.
"Did Naomi see it?" Zara's voice came out barely above a whisper.
Eli's silence lasted exactly one second too long.
"Her read receipt," he said, "was already on it."