Chapter 1

Avery's POV

The scoreboard read 58:56 with two minutes left, and nobody in the Crestwood gym was watching the game the way I was.

They were watching Jace. The way he squared his shoulders before a shot, the way he pointed at the crowd after a good defensive stop like he was already thinking about the highlight reel. I was watching the other team's point guard drift a half step too far left every time Crestwood ran a pick near the top of the key. Small thing. Most people wouldn't have caught it on their third watch of the game film, let alone live, from a folding chair near the team bench.

I'd caught it by the second quarter.

Their guard was cheating toward the middle on defense because their coach was terrified of Jace driving baseline. It left the strong side corner open every single time, just for a second, just long enough.

I leaned forward and caught Jace's eye during the dead ball. He jogged close enough to hear me over the crowd, the way he always did, like it was normal for a girl in the third row to have a direct line to the star of the team.

"Corner's open every time you go middle," I said. "Their guard overcommits. Look for Malik in the strong corner off the next screen."

He didn't ask how I knew. He never asked how I knew. He just nodded once, jogged back, and on the very next possession he drove middle, drew two defenders, and kicked it to Malik standing alone in the corner. Clean three. The gym came apart.

I felt the old warmth spread through my chest, the one I always got when a read paid off, when something I saw in my head became something real on the court. For a moment I let myself have it. I let myself feel proud, the way you're allowed to feel proud of something you built even if your name isn't on it.

Crestwood closed the game out on the next two possessions using the same weakness. Final score sixty-four to fifty-eight. The student section spilled onto the edge of the court, chanting Jace's name, and I sat there clapping with the rest of them, already thinking about how I'd tell him afterward that the whole second half had been sitting right there in the numbers if anyone had bothered to look.

I found Maya near the concession stand and told her I'd catch up with her outside. I wanted to find Jace before the crowd swallowed him whole.

The hallway behind the locker rooms was quieter, lit by the kind of buzzing fluorescent light that makes everything look a little unreal. I heard his voice before I turned the corner, low and easy, the voice he used when he thought no one important was listening.

I turned the corner anyway.

Sienna Blake had her arms looped around his neck, and he kissed her like it was something they'd done a hundred times before, unhurried, certain. Not a mistake. Not something that could be explained away as a slip or a misunderstanding or a bad night. I stood there in the doorway of that hallway and felt the floor tilt slightly under me, the specific vertigo of watching two years of your life rearrange itself into something you never agreed to.

I should have made a sound. I didn't. My body went very still, the way it does when I'm reading a defense and don't want to give away that I've seen the gap.

"You were perfect tonight," Sienna said against his mouth, pulling back just enough to look up at him. "That corner read in the third quarter? Coach is going to lose his mind over that."

"Yeah," Jace said, and there was something in the way he said it, easy, careless, like he wasn't even thinking about where the read had actually come from. "I've got good instincts."

"You do," Sienna said. "Better than good. Better than that whole notebook Avery keeps."

The hallway went very quiet in my ears. Not silent. Quiet in the way sound gets when your own pulse is louder than everything else.

"She'd lose her mind if she knew how much I show you," Jace said, and he laughed, actually laughed, soft and low like it was a private joke between them. "Don't tell her about the defensive rotations thing. That one's still working."

"I won't," Sienna said. "I like having something that's just ours."

I didn't move. I didn't gasp or step back or make my presence known. Something cold and very clear settled into place behind my ribs, and it felt less like heartbreak and more like a lock clicking shut. I understood, in that hallway, with a precision that almost frightened me, that this was not simply a boy cheating on his girlfriend. This was a boy who had taken two years of my work, my film study, my sleepless nights breaking down opposing defenses, and handed pieces of it to another girl like party favors, all while letting an entire school believe it was his mind alone doing the work.

I took out my phone.

My hands did not shake. I want that on record, if only for myself.

I recorded eleven seconds of them standing there, Sienna's fingers still resting at the back of Jace's neck, his hand at her waist like it belonged there. Eleven seconds was enough. Enough that no one could later suggest I had misunderstood, had exaggerated, had been the jealous girlfriend inventing a crisis out of a hug.

Then I backed away slowly, silently, and slipped through a side door into the empty gym.

The overhead lights had been dimmed to half power for cleanup, and the court stretched out in front of me, lines and numbers and the quiet after a crowd has gone. This was the gym where Jace first told me he loved me, sophomore year, sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers with popcorn between us. This was the gym where I'd sat alone at eleven at night more times than I could count, breaking down film on my laptop while he was out with his friends, telling myself it counted as time together because I was doing it for him.

My phone buzzed against my palm.

Jace: Where are you?

Jace: We need to celebrate.

Jace: You coming?

Jace: Avery?

Four messages, sent within ninety seconds of each other, each one a little more impatient than the last. He didn't know that I knew. He thought I was still exactly where I'd always been, waiting for him to remember I existed once the crowd thinned out.

I looked at his name on the screen for a long moment. Two years lived inside that name. Study sessions and film nights and every quiet sacrifice I'd told myself was love instead of what it actually was, which was disappearing a little more every season so he could take up all the space.

I opened his contact and pressed delete, and the confirmation screen blinked once before his name was simply gone.

Then I opened the email I'd been sitting on for a week, the one from Westbridge Prep's coaching staff, offering me a transfer spot on their basketball program after Coach Reyes had seen my name attached to Crestwood's game plans through a mutual contact and asked to meet. I'd told myself I wasn't ready. I'd told myself Crestwood was home.

I read the offer one more time under the dim gym lights, and this time I didn't hesitate.

I pressed accept.

Tomorrow, I would leave Crestwood behind. And Jace Carter would finally discover exactly what his perfect game looked like without me standing quietly behind it.