Chapter 2

Avery's POV

I didn't sleep much, but I didn't cry either, and by the time morning came I'd already decided which version of myself was walking into Crestwood that day. Not the girl who stayed up until midnight breaking down opposing defenses for a boy who called it his own instinct. Someone quieter than that. Someone already halfway gone.

Jace found me at my locker before first period, and I felt the whole hallway shift the way it always did around him, heads turning, a few girls whispering behind their hands. He had that same easy grin from the night before, the one that used to mean everything was fine.

"You disappeared on me," he said, leaning against the locker beside mine like he owned the space, like he always had. "I texted you like four times."

"I saw," I said, and kept my eyes on the books I was pulling out, stacking them with more care than they needed.

"So why didn't you answer?"

I closed the locker and looked at him properly for the first time since the hallway outside the boys' locker room, since Sienna's arms around his neck, since she'd lose her mind if she knew how much I show you. He looked exactly the same. Confident. Certain the world still worked the way it always had for him. It struck me, in that moment, how strange it was that a person could change everything about how you see them and still look completely unchanged themselves.

"I was tired," I said. "Good game, by the way. That corner read worked out well."

Something flickered behind his eyes, quick and gone, the closest thing to guilt I'd ever seen cross his face. "Yeah. Instincts were on tonight."

"Instincts," I repeated, and let the word sit there a moment longer than comfortable before I smiled, small and even. "Must be nice."

He didn't catch it. That was the thing about Jace. He'd spent so long being told he was the smartest player on the floor that he never once considered the possibility that someone standing three feet away already knew the truth and was simply choosing not to say it yet.

I didn't tell him about the hallway. I didn't tell him about the recording sitting quietly in my phone, backed up now in two places because I wasn't foolish enough to keep something that valuable in only one. I didn't mention Sienna's name at all. This was the first lesson I gave myself that morning, standing at my locker with my heart doing something slow and heavy behind my ribs. Evidence loses its power the moment you show your hand too early. I had learned that from film study, from watching a hundred games where the team that revealed its whole strategy in the first quarter always ran out of answers by the fourth.

I let Jace walk me to homeroom like nothing had shifted, and I let him talk about the win, about the scout who'd apparently been in the stands, about how Coach wanted to run more sets through him next game. I said the right things at the right pauses. I'd had two years of practice being exactly what he needed me to be, and it turned out that skill didn't disappear overnight even when everything underneath it had.

Sienna found me at lunch.

She sat down across from me at the corner table with a tray she didn't need, since she usually ate with the other girls near the windows, and smiled at me the way she always did, warm and careful, like we were friends who simply hadn't found the time to become close yet.

"Big win last night," she said. "Jace looked incredible."

"He did," I said.

"You two seem so solid," she went on, tilting her head slightly, studying me in a way that made the back of my neck prickle. "Two years is a long time. Most people our age can't hold something together that long."

I understood then that this was a test. She wanted to see if I knew anything, wanted to read my face for cracks the same way I read a defense for gaps. I gave her nothing. I'd spent two years learning how to disappear inside a room while still technically occupying a seat in it, and that skill, it turned out, worked just as well on her as it had on everyone else.

"We've been through a lot," I said simply, and reached for my water, and watched something in her posture ease slightly, satisfied, convinced she'd found no threat sitting across from her.

She had no idea what I already knew. She had no idea that somewhere in my phone was proof of exactly how careful ours wasn't.

After school I went to the gym office instead of the parking lot, and Coach Reyes from Westbridge was waiting exactly when he said he would be, a folder of transfer paperwork already prepared on the desk between us. He was younger than I expected, sharper around the eyes, the kind of coach who looked like he noticed everything and said very little about most of it.

"You're sure about this," he said, not quite a question.

"I'm sure," I said.

"Word around the league is you've been the one drawing up Crestwood's game plans," he said, watching me carefully. "That true?"

I thought about lying, the reflex still strong even now, the habit of shrinking myself down to something less noticeable. Then I thought about the hallway, about she'd lose her mind if she knew, about two years spent making someone else look like a genius while I sat quietly in the stands clapping for my own work under another name.

"It's true," I said.

Something like satisfaction crossed his face, brief and professional. "Good. Then Westbridge just got a lot more interesting."

I signed the last page of the transfer paperwork with a steadiness that surprised even me, and when I walked out of that office the late afternoon light was slanting gold across the parking lot, and for the first time since the hallway I let myself feel something other than control. Something lighter. Something that felt, terrifyingly, like the beginning of relief.

My phone buzzed as I reached my car. Jace, again, asking if I wanted to get food, asking if something was wrong, asking why I'd been quiet all day.

I didn't answer.

Tomorrow I would tell him I was leaving Crestwood. I would watch his face rearrange itself from confusion into disbelief, because a boy like Jace Carter had never once imagined a world where I simply stopped waiting for him to notice me.

He was about to find out exactly what that world looked like.