CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
LYDIA'S POV

I skipped econ again today.

I told myself it was because I hadn't finished the reading. Which was true, technically.

Mr. Falade had a way of embarrassing you when he picks you out to answer his questions, and you fail.

But yeah… the truth was I hadn’t finished reading. The same way it had been true the last three times I'd used it as a reason.

The truth underneath the true thing was simple.

I couldn't sit two seats away from Athena and pretend my body wasn't tensing every time she so much as shifted in her chair, waiting for the moment she'd finally turn and ask me the question I still didn't have an answer for.

Why are you avoiding me?

She hadn't asked it yet. Not directly. But I could feel it building in her every time our eyes almost met in a hallway and I found somewhere else to look first.

I spent the period in the library instead, at the table furthest from the door, with a book open in front of me that I wasn't reading. I kept replaying the same three minutes from weeks ago, the way you press on a bruise just to confirm it still hurts.

It still did.

I'd gone to grab my charger from the hallway table by the kitchen after stirring the simmering vegetables. When my mother began that conversation.

"I just don't know how much longer I can watch her put on a brave face about it," my mother had said. You’d think she was irritated. It was weird to me because I genuinely believed my mother loved Athena like a daughter. "A matrix. Of all the wolves for him to reject, and now everyone's supposed to act like it's not the kindest thing that could've happened. She was never going to be able to give a pack what a real wolf could. It's sad, but it's the truth of it."

I hadn't moved. I hadn't said anything. I hadn't defended her initially.

And maybe that’s what gave her the audacity to continue.

That was the part that sat the heaviest. It wasn't that my mother had said something cruel behind a closed door but that I had stood there and let it exist unchallenged until I had heard enough.

And somewhere underneath the shock of hearing it, some small, disgusting part of me had recognized the shape of thoughts I hadn't fully admitted to having myself.

I didn't think Athena deserved what happened to her. I want to be clear about that, even in my own head, even now. But I'd be lying if I said some part of me hadn't quietly wondered what my mother had said.

Hearing her say it out loud hadn't planted that thought. It had just shown it to me, fully grown, already living in me, and I hated that more than I could say.

When we walked out with the cookies and didn’t see Athena, and Ellen had told us she had come to the kitchen. I knew she had heard everything.

Or maybe, if not everything, then most.

I had wanted to run after her, then I had wanted to stop by her house. But I kept making excuses with the hour and eventually I'd stopped waiting for a good enough excuse and just let the gaps between us stretch a little longer each second. Telling myself I'd close them again once I figured out how to look at her without also seeing my mother's voice sitting behind my own eyes.

I hadn't figured it out. The gap had just kept growing wider.

The bell rang somewhere down the hall, through the library door, and I realized I'd been sitting with the same page open for the entire period without turning it once.

Dave had asked me this morning if I'd talked to her. I'd said something vague about things being complicated. The same nothing-answer I imagined Athena was probably giving people when they asked her the same question from the other direction.

It was strange, being on this side of the distance instead of inside it. I used to be the person people came to for updates on Athena. Now I was just another name that had gone quiet on her.

I thought about Grey sometimes, how he still texted me random reels the way he always had. Oblivious or maybe just kind enough to pretend to be oblivious to whatever had happened between his sister and me.

He was an incredibly smart kid if you knew him well enough.

I thought about how easy it would be to just show up at their door the way I used to, and how impossible that felt now. Like the door had a weight to it that hadn't been there before.

The problem was never that I stopped caring about her. If anything, I thought about her more now than I ever had before. Just from a distance.

Guilt has a way of making a person more present in your mind. Not less… even while you're actively working to be less present in theirs.

I didn't know how to say I'm not avoiding you because I’m happy about what happened to you, I'm avoiding you because of what almost came out of me when I heard it, and I'm still not sure it isn't still in there somewhere.

That wasn't something you could say over a hallway or a shared economics class. That was something you said sitting across from someone with nowhere else to look, and I wasn't ready for that yet. I didn't know if I'd ever be ready for that.

I packed up my things when the bell rang again, signaling the end of second period, and made myself walk toward the cafeteria instead of finding another excuse to disappear into.

Somewhere across the cafeteria, at a table I was very carefully not looking toward, I knew exactly where Athena was sitting without having to check.