Chapter 12 Chapter 12

Chapter 12 Chapter 12


I was actually looking for anything but I keep returning to Liam bag, even now I was not looking for anything in particular. I was not the kind of girlfriend who went through bags, through phones, through the private pockets of my boyfriend life looking for evidence to confirm what I already suspected. That had never been me.

I was looking for his car keys.

Liam had texted at two in the afternoon asking me to grab them from his gym bag, he had left it at mine after Thursday's practice and needed them before tonight.

I had crossed my room to where the bag sat against the wall and unzipped the main compartment and reached inside.

My fingers felt something metallic inside his bag.

A chain. Delicate, the links small and even, the kind of metalwork that came in a velvet box from a jeweler rather than a mall kiosk. I pulled it out.

A necklace.

A small gold heart pendant, the surface slightly textured, the kind of thing that was designed to look like it meant something because it had been chosen carefully for someone specific.

I held it in the light from my window.

Pretty. Real gold, probably. Liam's family had money in the way that went unmentioned because it didn't need to be mentioned.

I put my hand back in the bag for the keys.

My fingers found another chain.

The same weight. The same links. The same small gold heart.

I pulled it out.

Held both of them up, side by side, in the winter light coming through my bedroom window.

Identical.

Two identical gold heart necklaces in the same gym bag, in separate interior pockets, purchased, I understood with the clean, quiet certainty of someone whose mind worked fast when it needed to, at the same time. From the same place. For two different girls who were never supposed to hold them at the same moment.

I stood there for a long time.

My face was very still.

This is what I know about myself, I do not cry when I am hit hardest. I cried at the end of films with talking animals. I cried at songs that arrived at the wrong moment and found something unguarded. But when something real and large and final happened, when the worst thing arrived I went somewhere very quiet inside myself.

I went there now.

I looked at the two necklaces.

Placeholder, Madison had said, in the library, folding her hands on the table like she was doing me a professional courtesy.

I had known. I had filed it in the back of my head under things that are probably true that I am not examining. I had carried it for two weeks like a stone in a pocket aware of the weight, choosing not to look at it.

But knowing and holding were different things.

Knowing lived in your head. Holding lived in your hands.

I set one necklace on my desk. The other I held, the chain draping over my fingers, the gold heart sitting in my palm.

Whose is whose.

It didn't matter. That was the thing I realized standing there in the afternoon light in my bedroom with my face completely still. It didn't matter which one was mine and which one was hers because the act of buying two was the answer to every question I hadn't let myself ask.

I was not special.

I was one of two.

A matched set.

The stone in my chest, the cold, decided thing that had been growing since the mirror moment, since Madison's library visit, since the dark field and Jax's flat voice saying placeholder in a different word, pressed down and became something denser. Heavier. The kind of weight that didn't hurt anymore because it had stopped feeling like pain and started feeling like structure.

Like something you could build on.

I opened my jewellery box on the desk. The small one with the mirror inside the lid that my mother had given me for my sixteenth birthday. I moved two things aside and placed the second necklace,vLiam's necklace, the one meant for me, the one that made me half of a matched set purchased for two girls who were never supposed to compare notes in the center of the box.

Then I lifted it out again.

Looked at it one more time.

And put it on.

The clasp was small and my fingers were steady. The chain settled against my collarbone, cool at first, then warming to my skin. The heart pendant rested at the base of my throat, light as nothing, visible above every neckline I owned.

I looked at myself in the jewellery box mirror.

The girl looking back at me had a gold heart at her throat that had been bought as one half of a pair for a boy who had been keeping two girls in separate pockets like spare change.

She did not look sad.

She looked deliberate.

This, I thought is not a type of gift I want, not a gesture. Not evidence of being chosen or wanted or valued. A trophy taken from the field. Something I was wearing not because it meant what it was supposed to mean but because it meant something entirely different now, something only I knew, something that sat against my skin every second I wore it as a reminder.

I found the car keys in the outer pocket of the bag where they had always been.

I texted Liam. “Found them. Front compartment.”

He replied in forty seconds. “You're the best, babe.”

I read it. Set my phone face-down on the desk. Looked at my reflection one more time, the necklace, the still face, the eyes that had stopped being soft somewhere in the last week and showed no signs of going back.

The best, he had said.

One of two.

I picked up my phone and texted back a single heart emoji because that was what the old Sienna would have done, because the old Sienna was
still a costume I was wearing until I was ready to take it off, and I was not quite ready for that yet.