Chapter 29: What Ryder Won't Say

POV: Lila Monroe

I spent twenty minutes after Priya hung up sitting exactly where I had been, turning her last sentence over in the particular way I turned things that had not fully resolved.

He is going to get hurt.

Not a threat. That was the thing I kept returning to, the thing that made it harder to put away than a threat would have been, because threats had identifiable sources and identifiable responses and I was very good at both of those things. This had been something else. A warning from a person who was angry enough to have wanted to wound me and had chosen not to, which meant the warning was real.

Which meant Priya knew something I did not.

I texted Ryder: "Priya called me. She is not going to Kieran. She said something else. Can we talk."

He replied in under a minute: "Tomorrow. I need to handle something tonight."

I looked at that message for a long time. Handle something. He had handled something this afternoon with the journalist, and the day before that with Marcus, and the day before that when he had shown up at my door and said you have been scared for two days. He was always handling something.

I did not text back.

I went to bed and slept for seven solid hours, which was more than I had managed in the past week, and which was either because I was deeply exhausted or because something small had settled slightly, and I could not tell which one it was.

In the morning I had a lecture at nine and then a two-hour gap, and I used the gap to sit in the north end of the library with my documentation file open and my notebook beside it, adding everything from the last forty-eight hours in the careful chronological format I had been using since I started building the file on Edmund Kane.

I had been at it for forty minutes, the notebook filling quietly with new entries, when someone sat down across from me without asking.

I looked up.

Priya.

Not the Priya from the library last month, composed and pointed and coming for a very specific target. This version had something different in her face, something that had been rearranged since the phone call last night, and she looked at me for a moment before she said anything.

"I am not here to fight," she said.

"Okay," I said.

"I did not sleep," she said. "Which I am not telling you for sympathy. I am telling you because I spent most of the night thinking and I arrived at something I was not expecting to arrive at."

I closed my notebook carefully but did not put it away.

"He walked away from me yesterday," she said. "Right after what happened with Kieran. I went to find him and he looked at me and he just walked away. Not angrily. Not guiltily. Just, done with the conversation before it started." She paused. "I have known Ryder Kane for two years. He does not walk away from things."

"What does he usually do," I said.

"He waits them out. He manages them. He finds a way to be in the room without the room becoming a conflict." She looked at me. "He walked away because the conversation would have required him to explain something he does not want to explain. Which means there is something he does not want to say."

I was listening carefully. Not just to the words.

"What do you think it is," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. Something moved through her face that she did not entirely manage to contain, and underneath it was the specific tiredness of someone who had been carrying a particular hope for a long time and had finally looked at it clearly.

"I think he is in it," she said. "Whatever this is. Not playing a part. Actually in it. And I think he does not know what to do with that, so he is doing what he always does with things he does not know what to do with." She paused. "He is handling them."

I said nothing.

"I spent two full years believing I knew him better than anyone on this campus," she said. "And I probably did. But knowing someone is not the same as being known by them. I watched him with you at the athletics event. Before I was angry about it. I watched him and there was something in his face that I had never seen before and I did not know what it was then." She looked at the table. "I know what it is now."

"Priya," I said.

"I am not asking for anything from you," she said. "I am not making any claim. I just." She stopped. "I needed to say it to someone who mattered, and you are currently the person who matters."

I sat with that.

She straightened. When she spoke again, her voice had returned to something closer to the version I had encountered before. Not unkind but contained.

"There is something else I need to tell you," she said.

"Tell me."

"Edmund Kane had lunch today. Not on campus. At the private club he uses for board meetings." She met my eyes directly. "Two board members. Edmund. And a lawyer."

I kept my face where I had put it.

"My father said your name came up in conversation," she said. "He did not know the context. He mentioned it the way you mention something irrelevant. But I know what your name in that context means."

I said nothing for a moment. Then: "Why are you telling me."

She looked at me for a long time.

"Because he walked away from me," she said, "and whatever he is doing, he does not deserve the part that is coming from his father. Even if I am not the one he is walking toward."

She picked up her bag and stood and left.

I sat at the library table with my notebook still closed and my documentation file open on the screen and Edmund Kane's name at the top of the page and thought about a board meeting that had included a lawyer and my name, and what that combination meant when Edmund had been quiet for over a week.

The silence had not been retreat.

It had been careful preparation.