Chapter 7: Seven

He finds the note in his locker the next morning.

White paper. Folded once. No name on the outside.

He opens it.

Everyone knows. Ask her what she told Douglas. Ask her what she's really doing in your house. Some people do things for reasons. A friend

No signature. The handwriting is printed, careful, deliberately unrecognizable.

Cole folds it back up.

He stands at his locker for a moment. The hallway moves around him noise, bodies, lockers slamming and he is perfectly still in the middle of it.

He puts the note in his pocket. Closes his locker. Walks to first period.

The note is from Madison. He knows this without needing the signature the phrasing, the timing, the surgical precision of some people do things for reasons. Madison has always understood that suggestion is more powerful than accusation. An accusation can be disproved. A suggestion just sits in the mind and works.

He does not believe it.

He wants to be clear about this, to himself, in the privacy of his own head he does not believe that Wren Hayes is in his house for any reason other than the one she stated. He has watched her for six days now and she has not once done anything that resembles a motive beyond taking care of Daisy and doing it better than he dared hope for.

But the note is designed to plant a seed.

And seeds are annoying things. They do not require belief to grow.

He gets through first period. Second period. He is halfway through third period when Marcus slides a folded piece of paper onto his desk.

Cole opens it under the desk.

She's showing people the photo. The one through the window. She's saying Wren is obsessed with you and manufactured the job to get close. I'm sorry man.

Cole reads it twice.

Then he looks at the front of the room where Mr. Patterson is explaining the causes of World War One and thinks about Wren going to Douglas's office alone, without telling him, handling it before he even knew it needed handling. Thought about the way she said we're fine like it was a fact she had already checked and verified.

He thinks about a girl who has been protecting her mother from the truth for one hundred and sixty-four mornings and did not collapse under it.

Madison is going to have to do better than a photo through a window.

He folds the note. Puts it in his pocket with the first one.

He sees Wren in the hallway between fourth and fifth period.

She is at the water fountain and she straightens up and their eyes meet and she does the thing the quick read, the assessment, the door left slightly ajar. She clocks the set of his shoulders and the way he is walking and she knows something is wrong before he opens his mouth.

"Walk with me," he says.

She falls into step beside him. They walk toward the library away from the main corridor, away from the places where people stand and watch and report back.

"She's circulating a photo," Cole says. "The one through the kitchen window. She's telling people you manufactured the job."

Wren is quiet for three steps.

"Is anyone believing her?" she asks.

"Some. Enough."

Another three steps.

"Let them," Wren says.

He looks at her.

"Anyone worth worrying about will figure out the truth," she says. "Anyone who believes Madison without asking me directly isn't worth the energy." She glances at him sideways. "Does it bother you? What they're saying?"

"Yes," he says, because he is done performing indifference to her specifically.

Something shifts in her expression. "Why?"

He looks straight ahead. "Because it makes you a target. More than you already are. And that's " He stops.

"That's what?" she asks quietly.

He doesn't answer.

She doesn't push.

They walk in silence to the library corridor and then she peels off toward her class and he goes the other direction and neither of them says goodbye, but when he rounds the corner he stops walking for a second and stands there.

That's my fault, he didn't say. That's on me. All of it. And I don't know how to fix something this large.

He keeps walking.

Daisy is asleep on the couch when he gets home.

Just Daisy curled on her side with Gerald tucked under her chin, the TV on low, a throw blanket that is slightly too big for her pulled up to her chin. Wren is in the kitchen. She has tea in front of her and a book open and she looks up when he comes in and says nothing, just tilts her head toward the living room in a silent she went down early.

He looks at his sister sleeping.

Something happens in his chest that he doesn't have a word for. The particular relief of a thing being okay when you have been quietly afraid it wouldn't be.

He goes to the kitchen. Gets a glass of water. Stands at the counter.

"She had a nightmare last night," Wren says quietly, not looking up from her book. "She called for you. I stayed with her until she went back to sleep." A pause. "She talks in her sleep. Did you know that?"

"What does she say?"

Wren turns a page. "She said Cole's here. Three times. Then she went back to sleep."

He looks at his glass.

"Thank you," he says.

Wren says nothing. But she turns another page and the kitchen is quiet and warm and outside it is getting dark and somewhere in this house his sister is sleeping safely and said his name in her sleep like an answer to a question.

He should do the bills. He should check the school portal. He should respond to Coach's email about Friday's game.

He sits down at the table instead. Across from Wren. He doesn't have a reason. He just sits.

Wren reads.

Cole sits.

The clock on the microwave moves from six-fourteen to six-fifteen to six-sixteen.

"The extension was approved," he says. "The hardship program."

Wren turns a page. "Good."

"It buys us three months."

"Then you have three months to figure out the next part."

He looks at her. "Do you always do that?"

"Do what?"

"Take a problem and immediately turn it into a plan."

She considers this like it is a genuine question that deserves a genuine answer. "My mom can't," she says simply. "So someone has to."

The clock moves to six-seventeen.

"My dad couldn't either," Cole says.

Wren looks up.

He is looking at the table the grain of the wood, the ring left by a mug that he has never bothered to sand out. "He could only add," he says. "Never subtract. Never look at what was there and decide it needed to go." He pauses. "I had to learn that one myself."

The room is very quiet.

Wren closes her book.

She doesn't say I know what you did. She doesn't say Daisy told me. She just looks at him with an expression he is only now starting to be able to read the door not just ajar but open, a fraction, the first real fraction, and behind it something that is not pity and is not sympathy and is something far more difficult to receive than either.

Understanding.

"Cole," she says quietly.

And then Daisy appears in the doorway in her throw blanket with Gerald in her arms and her hair flattened on one side and says "Why are you both just sitting there" in the voice of someone who finds stillness deeply suspicious, and the moment breaks, and Wren opens her book again, and Cole gets up to start dinner.

But he carries it with him for the rest of the evening.

Cole's here. Three times. Like an answer.

He is still thinking about it when he counts to sixty in the driveway the next morning.

This time forty seconds is enough.