Chapter 8: Eight Wren's POV

She tells Priya everything on Wednesday morning.

Not in the hallway, not at the library table Priya pulls her into the girls bathroom on the third floor, the quiet one, and stands against the door with her arms crossed and her expression set to I am not moving until you talk.

So Wren talks.

All of it. The electricity envelope. The toast cut into triangles. Daisy and Gerald and the jump rope on the back lawn. Madison's text. Mr. Douglas. The photo through the kitchen window. The hallway conversation yesterday where Cole said that bothers me without finishing the sentence and she understood exactly what he didn't say.

Priya listens without interrupting, which is extremely unlike her and means she is taking this seriously.

When Wren finishes, Priya is quiet for a long time.

"You like him," she says.

"I didn't say that."

"You described the way he cuts toast into triangles, Wren."

"I was providing context."

"You like him."

"He called me nobody."

"I know." Priya's voice is careful now. Gentle. The voice she only uses when she is about to say something true that Wren doesn't want to hear. "I know he did. And that was real and it hurt and it built two years of things that you have every right to still be angry about." She pauses. "But you went to his kitchen window and you saw the electricity bill and you looked away to protect his dignity. You did that on day one." She lets that sit. "You don't do that for people you don't already care about."

Wren looks at the bathroom tiles.

They are the dusty pink of every school bathroom she has ever been in. Someone has written be kind on the wall in permanent marker. Someone else has added or don't underneath it.

"It's a job," Wren says.

"Okay," Priya says.

"It's just a job."

"Okay," Priya says again, in the tone of someone who has said okay and means something else entirely.

The bell rings.

They go to class.

Madison is waiting at Wren's locker after second period.

Not Jade. Not a message. Madison herself, leaning against the locker with her iced coffee and her white cardigan and the particular patience of someone who has decided to be direct because the indirect approach has not produced the desired results.

Wren stops in front of her.

She does not adjust her posture. She does not look away. She has been doing difficult things with her face every day for one hundred and sixty-six mornings and Madison Cross is not harder than that.

"I want to talk," Madison says.

"You've been talking," Wren says. "To Douglas. To half the school. You've been talking quite a lot."

Something moves behind Madison's eyes. Recalibration. She expected defensive, not direct. "You don't understand the situation."

"I understand it fine."

"He's using you," Madison says. Her voice drops not to be kind, to be precise. "Cole doesn't let people in. He never has. Whatever you think is happening in that house, whatever he's showing you it's managed. It's controlled. He shows people exactly what he wants them to see and nothing else. I dated him for eight months and I know."

Wren looks at her.

She thinks about a boy counting to sixty in a driveway every morning. About a note he left on the kitchen counter after she applied for the hardship extension just the confirmation number, no message, slid under her bag where only she would find it. About the way he sat across from her at the kitchen table last night and said I had to learn that one myself and looked at the table while he said it, not at her, because some things are easier to say to wood grain than to a person.

"Are you worried about me?" Wren asks. "Or are you worried about you?"

Madison's jaw tightens.

"Because those are different conversations," Wren says. "And I'm only available for one of them."

She opens her locker. Takes out her books. Closes it again.

Madison hasn't moved.

"I know what he said about you," Madison says. Quietly. Deliberately. "In the hallway. Two years ago. I was there. I heard him."

"I know you were," Wren says. "You were standing four feet from me."

The silence that follows is a specific kind. The silence of someone who has just played what they believed was their final card and watched it land wrong.

Madison stares at her.

"You knew," she says.

"The whole time," Wren says. "Both of you."

She picks up her bag and walks to class and does not look back and does not let her hands shake until she is around the corner and no one can see.

She is at the Ramsey house at four-fifteen, helping Daisy construct what Daisy is calling a giraffe habitat in the living room involving every blanket in the house, three cushions, and Gerald's collection of accessories when her phone buzzes.

Unknown number.

She opens it.

A photo.

Her. Maplewood High entrance. This morning. Walking past Ms. Collins who is mid-wave at someone else. The angle is from across the street, slightly elevated. Someone was there with a camera when Wren didn't know anyone was watching.

Below it: I know things about you too. Things that have nothing to do with Cole. Back off or I start asking questions about why you smile at a certain teacher every morning like your life depends on it.

Wren reads it twice.

The blanket in her hands is yellow. Daisy chose yellow because Gerald likes sunshine.

"Wren?" Daisy is looking at her. "You stopped."

"Sorry." She hands Daisy the blanket. "Tuck it there Gerald needs a south-facing window."

"Giraffes are from Africa," Daisy says seriously. "They like warmth."

"Smart." Wren puts her phone face down on the coffee table. "So does that corner work?"

Daisy assesses the corner with great seriousness.

Wren's heart is going very fast inside a very still chest.

Madison doesn't know. She can't know nobody knows about Ms. Collins and her father except Priya, and Priya would never. What Madison has is an observation. A pattern. A girl who smiles at a teacher every morning with something that doesn't quite look like ordinary politeness.

That is not knowledge. That is a thread.

The question is whether Madison is willing to pull it.

The question is whether Wren is going to let herself be afraid of that.

She picks up a cushion. Hands it to Daisy. "East wall," she says. "For the mornings."

Daisy takes the cushion and goes.

Wren sits in the half-built giraffe habitat in the Ramsey living room and makes a decision.

She is done being managed by this.

Cole gets home at seven.

He walks into the living room and stops at the sight of approximately every soft furnishing in the house arranged into an elaborate structure around a stuffed giraffe.

"Gerald has a habitat now," Daisy announces from inside it.

"I can see that."

"It's scientifically accurate."

"Is it."

"Wren helped." Daisy's head appears through a gap between two cushions. "She's in the kitchen. She's been quiet for a while. The cooking kind of quiet, not the sad kind. I checked."

Cole looks at the kitchen doorway.

He looks back at Daisy.

"You checked," he says.

"I pay attention," Daisy says, with great dignity, and retreats back into the habitat.

Wren is at the stove. She hears him come in and doesn't turn around.

"Madison texted me again," she says.

He is quiet.

"A photo this time. Of me at school. And a threat not specific, but enough." She stirs. "She knows something she doesn't fully know yet. She's trying to make me think she has more than she does."

Cole comes to stand at the counter. Not across the island next to her. Closer than he usually stands. She can see him in her peripheral vision.

"What does she almost know?" he asks quietly.

Wren considers the pot. Considers the question.

"Something about my family," she says. "Not yours. Mine."

He doesn't ask what. She notices this the deliberate not-asking, the same way she looked away from his electricity bill on the first day. He is learning the grammar of this. The way two people who are both carrying things can stand next to each other and not pry.

"Okay," he says.

"I'm going to talk to her," Wren says. "Tomorrow. Face to face. I need you to not interfere."

"Wren "

"Cole." She looks at him now. He is closer than she realized and his expression is doing the thing the door, slightly open, something behind it that is becoming harder to look at directly. "I have been managing my own life for a long time. I know how to do this."

He looks at her for a moment.

"I know you do," he says.

It is the simplest thing he has said to her. It lands harder than it should.

She turns back to the stove.

"Dinner's in ten minutes," she says.

He stays where he is for a moment three seconds, four and she is acutely aware of the three inches between his arm and hers. Then he opens the cabinet above her head to get glasses down and the moment breaks into something ordinary and they move around each other in the kitchen the way they have started to move easy, unspoken, aware and neither of them names it.

But Daisy appears in the doorway, takes one look at both of them, and goes back to the habitat with the satisfied expression of someone whose hypothesis has been confirmed.