Chapter 50 The Burning
The lie had tasted like ash, Silas had said. But it had worked.
That was the thing about Elara: she wanted so badly to believe she was winning that she’d talk herself into it. She’d left Marchand’s that night with her hand in his and that serene smile on her face, and Silas had walked her back to her dorm and kissed her cheek goodnight and then stood outside in the cold for a long time afterward, just breathing.
He’d told Mia about it the next morning through a brief, carefully worded text. Dinner was fine. She bought it. Mostly. Mia had read it three times before typing back: Mostly isn’t completely. His response came quickly: No. It’s not.
That word sat with Mia all through her Tuesday morning lecture, through her lunch she barely touched, through the long walk back to her dorm that afternoon. Mostly. Elara was still picking at the edges of things, still watching for cracks. Which meant the performance had to be flawless. Which meant there could be absolutely nothing left that connected Mia Torres to Ethan Sullivan in any way she hadn’t already explained.
She sat on her bed that evening and thought about it carefully.
Elara had broken into her room. She’d gone through everything, touched everything, searched for something that could unravel the story Mia had been telling. She hadn’t found the evidence folder, thank God. But what if she came back and looked harder? What if she started digging somewhere else?
Mia’s eyes moved to the small wooden box on her shelf. She kept it there because it looked like a keepsake box, the kind of thing any girl might have. Nobody would think twice about it. But inside were things she hadn’t been able to throw away. A movie stub from the first film she and Ethan had seen together. A birthday card in his handwriting. Two photographs she’d printed and kept because they were her favorites, the ones that didn’t exist on social media, the ones nobody else would have copies of.
She got up slowly and took the box down.
If Elara was investigating her background, she’d eventually find the social media traces. Mia had already scrubbed what she could, deleted tagged photos, removed her hometown from her profiles, made her accounts private months ago. But private accounts could still be requested. Mutual friends could still be questioned. And if anyone started asking the right people the right questions back home, eventually someone would mention Ethan’s name alongside hers.
She couldn’t control all of that. But she could control this.
She opened the box and looked at everything inside for a long moment. Then she carried it to the small metal trash can by her desk, the one she used for scrap paper. She needed something to start a flame. Her eyes landed on the pack of matches she kept for the scented candles she burned when she couldn’t sleep.
The movie stub went first. It curled at the edges, blackened, and turned to nothing in about four seconds.
The birthday card took longer. She watched Ethan’s handwriting disappear word by word, his particular way of writing the letter Y, the way he always put too many exclamation marks, gone. She pressed her lips together hard.
Then the photographs.
The first one she could handle. It was a good photo, her and Ethan at his cousin’s barbecue, laughing at something off-camera. She didn’t even remember what had been so funny. She dropped it into the can and didn’t watch it burn.
The second one was the problem.
It was from two summers ago. They’d been at the river near her house, the one they’d been going to since they were kids. Ethan had his arm around her shoulders and they were both squinting into the sun, but he was looking at her, not the camera. She’d always loved that about it. He was looking at her like she was the most interesting thing in the frame.
She held it for too long.
Then she dropped it in.
The flame caught the corner and ate its way across slowly, and Mia sat on the edge of her bed and watched it go and let herself cry, quietly, with her hand pressed over her mouth so the sound didn’t carry through the thin dorm walls. She wasn’t crying for the photo. She was crying for him, for the version of this year that should have existed, the one where she transferred here and surprised him and they spent the semester figuring out how to share a campus, how to be together in the same zip code for the first time in two years.
That version of the year was ash now too.
When the last corner of the photograph disappeared, she wiped her face, dropped the matchbook back on her desk, and went to wash her hands. The trash can held nothing but gray flakes that crumbled if you breathed on them.
Which was good because that was the point.
She was pouring herself a glass of water when her phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number, no introduction, just four words: You should have never come.
Mia stared at it.
Then, very deliberately, she set the glass down, took a screenshot, blocked the number, and texted Silas: We need to move faster.
His reply came in under a minute: Music room. Tomorrow. Early.
She put her phone face-down on the desk and looked at the ceiling for a while, the way she’d been doing a lot lately. The anonymous text could be a bluff. Elara rattling her cage to see what jumped out. Or it could mean she’d actually found something, some thread connecting Mia to Ethan that hadn’t been burned or deleted yet.
Either way, the message had done its job. Mia’s heart was beating faster.
She hoped that was all it had been designed to do.