Chapter 29
Summer's POV
Kieran stopped dead when he saw me, his eyes widening. We stared at each other for a frozen moment—him in the doorway, me crouched on the floor clutching a dented box of Pop-Tarts like an idiot.
"...How long have you been out here?" His voice was carefully neutral, but I could see the tension in his jaw.
I straightened slowly, my face on fire. "I—I was just—I came to thank you. For the physics notes. And I brought..." I thrust the Pop-Tarts toward him awkwardly. "These. Because you mentioned you liked strawberry flavor and I thought—"
"How much did you hear?" He cut me off, his eyes locked on mine.
I swallowed hard. Lying would be worse. "...Some of it."
His face went blank, that terrifying shuttered expression I'd seen before. He took a step back, his arms crossing over his chest defensively. "So now you know. Poor scholarship kid's sob story. Very entertaining."
"That's not—" My voice cracked. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop, I just—"
"Just happened to be standing outside the door at seven-thirty in the morning?" His tone was flat, cold. "Right."
"I wanted to thank you!" The words burst out of me, desperate. "For the notes. For staying up late to write them even though your hand—" I stopped, realizing what I'd just said.
His jaw tightened. "My hand is fine."
"It's not." The words came out softer now, almost a whisper. "And you still helped me anyway."
He stared at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then he looked down at the Pop-Tarts still clutched in my hands, at the card peeking out from under the box.
"You don't owe me anything," he said quietly.
"I know." I took a shaky breath, forcing myself to meet his eyes. "But I wanted to say thank you anyway. Because... because nobody's ever done something like that for me before."
That seemed to catch him off guard. Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or confusion. He opened his mouth, closed it, then finally reached out and took the Pop-Tarts from my hands. Our fingers brushed for half a second, and I felt that same electric jolt from before.
"I have to get to training," he said after a moment, his voice still guarded but not quite as cold.
"Right. Yeah. Of course." I stepped back, giving him space.
He started to walk past me, then paused. Without turning around, he said quietly, "...Next time you have physics questions, you can ask me again. If you want."
My heart did a complicated flip in my chest. "Really?"
"Yeah." His ears were turning red. "Really."
Then he was gone, his footsteps echoing down the hallway, leaving me standing there with my heart racing and a stupid smile spreading across my face.
---
I stood in that hallway for a long time after he left, my back against the wall, my mind replaying everything I'd just heard.
Thirty thousand dollars for Lily's surgery. Four hundred a month for his mom's medication. Debts he wouldn't even name. And Kieran, seventeen years old, choosing to sacrifice his own future—his own body—to pay for it all.
I thought about the credit card in my wallet, the one my mom had given me "for emergencies" with a limit high enough to cover Lily's entire surgery without making a dent in our family finances. I thought about my closet full of clothes I'd worn once, the piano lessons I'd skipped, the thousand careless ways I'd spent money without thinking.
I thought about Kieran saying "I have a left hand" in that terrible, calm voice, like losing the use of his right hand was just an inconvenience. Like it was a fair trade.
And I thought about the future I knew was coming—the one where he became cold and successful and powerful, where he built walls so high nobody could reach him. Where he married me not out of love but out of some twisted need for revenge or control or whatever had driven him to say yes when I was desperate and broken.
Had it started here? In this hallway, in these choices, in this slow grinding away of hope and softness until all that was left was survival?
I pushed off the wall and started walking toward the stairs, my jaw set.
No. Not this time.
I didn't know how yet. I couldn't just throw money at him—that would destroy whatever fragile trust we'd built. I couldn't force him to go to therapy or stop working himself to death.
But I could do something. I had to.
Because Kieran Cross had stayed up late with an injured hand to help me understand physics. Because he'd said I could ask him for help again. Because when he'd taken those Pop-Tarts from me, his ears had turned red and he'd looked almost... shy.
Because he mattered. And I wasn't going to let him disappear into that cold, empty future without a fight.
I wiped my eyes roughly with the back of my hand, took a deep breath, and headed down the stairs.
Tomorrow I'd figure out a plan. Tomorrow I'd find a way to help him that wouldn't hurt his pride or make him feel like charity.
But today, I'd given him strawberry Pop-Tarts and he'd said I could come back.
And that felt like a start.