Page 7 of The Faceoff

“Duly noted.”

“And if it goes badly, we’ll be here.”

I look at her.

Then at Wren, who is already clearing the table because that’s what Wren does when she has feelings she isn’t going to say out loud.

Then at June, who has reopened her book but isn’t reading it.

The thing beneath my ribs is back. Different shape now — warmer. More complicated.

“I know,” I say.

And I do.

Evan’s apartment is off Whitmore Avenue, in one of the old Victorians that hasn’t been converted to student housing because it’s too close to the athletic facilities to need to advertise. Senior athletes get first pick of off-campus housing. It’s one of those arrangements the university doesn’t publicize but everyone understands.

I’ve been here more times than I’ve admitted to my roommates.

I let myself in with the key he gave me in March — the giving of which I probably should have examined more carefully at the time, but didn’t, because I was twenty and it seemed like a gesture and I am very stupid sometimes about gestures.

The front hallway is dim.

The light over the stove is on in the kitchen. His jacket is slung over the back of the couch the way it always is, the casualness of a person who grew up in houses where other people cleaned things.

“Evan?”

Nothing.

I set my bag by the door and check my phone. Seven on the dot. He said seven.

Then I hear it.

From down the hall.

My first thought is that he’s watching something — that he fell asleep with his laptop open, which he does, which has always driven me slightly insane. My second thought arrives approximately half a second later, because I have ears and I know the difference between the sounds a laptop makes and the sounds that are currently coming from his bedroom, and those two categories do not overlap.

I stand very still in the hallway.

The sounds are not ambiguous.

“Evan.”

Louder this time, which accomplishes nothing, because the sounds from the bedroom are — notably — also louder, and I am apparently not the first priority in this acoustic competition.

I walk down the hall.

There is a part of me, the part that has been anticipating other people’s emotional weather since she was small enough to fit under a kitchen table, that knows what I’m about to see before I see it. That part has been doing the math quietly since I left the Sailmaker, which is why the thing I expected to feel — the blow of it, the ambush — doesn’t quite arrive the way I thought it would.

I push open the bedroom door.

And there it is.

Evan. In his bed. With a tall brunette I would know anywhere — the very straight posture, the very deliberate hair, the physical presence of someone who has been working at being visible since the day they decided visibility was a competitive sport.

Vivienne Park.

Of course it is.