Chapter 51 You Could Have Told Me

Chapter 51 You Could Have Told Me
POV: Zara

Naomi was already in homeroom when Zara walked in, phone in hand, face unreadable.

"Sit," Naomi said, not looking up. "Before the bell."

Zara sat. "What did you find?"

"Not here." Naomi's voice was low, controlled in a way that didn't match the urgency of her text fifteen minutes ago. "I need to show you something first. Just you."

She turned her phone around.

It was a thread, texts between Naomi and Marcus from two nights ago, the night of the party, the night Marcus had told Naomi about the leak. Zara skimmed it fast, then slower, because something in the middle of the thread didn't match what she'd been told.

Marcus: I already told Eli about this last week. He said he'd handle it.

Zara's stomach went cold. "Eli knew last week?"

"That's what I want to ask you," Naomi said, finally looking up. "Did you know he knew before the roof? Before any of it?"

"No. I swear, Naomi, I didn't"

"But you knew something." Naomi's eyes were too steady, too calm, the kind of calm that came right before something broke. "You've known things for days, and you didn't tell me. The leak. Marcus. Whatever happened on that roof Wednesday night that had my dad's car practically parked outside my house an hour later."

Zara opened her mouth. Nothing useful came out.

"I covered for both of you," Naomi said. "I told Marcus to come straight to you guys instead of going to my dad first. I've been trying to fix this for three days without even knowing what this actually was, because every time I asked, you said you were fine, and Eli said he'd explain later, and later just kept happening to other people instead of me."

"Naomi"

"I'm not done."

The bell rang. Nobody in the room seemed to notice or care; whatever was happening at Naomi and Zara's table had already pulled half the room's attention without either of them raising their voice.

Naomi set her phone down, flat on the desk, and looked at Zara with an expression Zara had never seen on her before, not the bonfire silence, not even anger. Something quieter and worse.

"You could have told me," Naomi said. "I would have been okay if you'd just told me."

"I was trying to protect you"

"From what? From the truth? Because that's not protecting me, Zara. That's deciding for me what I can handle, which is exactly what you got mad at your dad for doing your whole life. You said it yourself, remember? He doesn't get to decide what I can handle. You said that on the porch the night everything blew up the first time."

Zara felt the words land exactly where Naomi meant them to.

"I wasn't trying to be like that," she said quietly.

"Maybe not on purpose." Naomi's voice cracked, just slightly, the first crack in all that careful calm. "But it happened anyway. And now there's a video of you and my brother on a roof from last night, Zara, taken by someone close enough to know exactly when and where to point a camera, and I had to find out about that the same way the rest of the school did. Through a screen. Not from you."

"I didn't know it existed until this morning"

"That's not the part that hurts." Naomi stood up, gathering her bag, hands not quite steady. "The part that hurts is that even if you'd known about it five minutes after it happened, I still don't think you would've told me. Because that's the pattern now. You and Eli, deciding together what's safe for me to know."

"That's not true."

"Isn't it?"

Zara had no answer fast enough, and the silence stretched a half-second too long, and that half-second was its own kind of confession.

Naomi nodded once, like she'd just gotten the only answer she needed, and slung her bag over her shoulder.

"I said I knew who's behind this," she said. "I do. I figured it out an hour ago, and I was going to tell you both together, like a team, the way I thought we were doing this."

"Naomi, please"

"I'm not walking away because I'm done with you," Naomi said, already turning. "I'm walking away because I need five minutes where I'm not the last person in the room to understand my own life."

She left. She didn't slam the door. She didn't look back. That was somehow worse than if she had.

Zara sat there in the half-empty homeroom, the bell still echoing, and pulled out her phone with hands that wouldn't quite cooperate.

She opened the group thread, her, Eli, Naomi, scrolling back up to the message from an hour ago: I know who's behind this.

Naomi had never finished that thought. She'd never said the name.

Zara typed fast: Who is it? Please. Just tell me the name.

Three dots appeared almost instantly, like Naomi had been holding her phone the whole time, waiting.

The dots pulsed for four long seconds.

Then they vanished completely, with no reply, no name, nothing, and a moment later, the entire group thread disappeared from Zara's phone altogether, like Naomi had pulled herself out of it and taken the whole conversation down with her.