Chapter 6

Avery's POV

I waited eight days before I did anything with what I knew, and every one of those days I told myself the waiting was strategy and not fear. Both things could be true at once. I'd learned that much from film study, from watching teams sit on a lead too long because they were afraid of what happened if they pushed further and the play didn't work.

I wasn't going to sit on this one too long.

I didn't touch the video. That was the first decision I made and the one I held onto hardest, because the video wasn't a strategy, it was a detonator, and detonators only work once. What I had instead, sitting quietly in a folder on my phone beside the video, were screenshots. Three weeks of a text thread between Jace and Sienna, most of it useless, some of it not. The screenshot that mattered most showed my handwriting, photographed and forwarded, my breakdown of Lincoln Prep's defensive rotations, underneath it Jace's own words in blue text. Tell coach this was your read, it'll help your minutes.

That sentence wasn't proof of a relationship. Relationships weren't against any rule I could point to. But it was proof of something Crestwood's athletic program cared about a great deal, the kind of thing that mattered to college scouts and academic integrity boards and coaches who built entire recruiting pitches around the idea that their players' minds were as sharp as their bodies. Jace hadn't just taken credit for my work. He'd handed a piece of it to another player and called it hers, which meant Sienna had been presenting stolen strategy to her own coaching staff as original thought.

That was the kind of thing that ended seasons. Sometimes scholarships too.

I thought about sending it to Coach Daniels directly, and then I thought better of it, because a message arriving from Avery Bennett, recently transferred to Crestwood's biggest rival, would read exactly like what it was. Revenge. Nobody investigates revenge the same way they investigate a concern.

Instead I sent it to someone else. Someone who had no reason to protect either of them and every reason to care about the truth. Coach Daniels had an assistant, a younger coach named Marcus who ran film sessions and reviewed game plans line by line before they reached the head coach's desk, the kind of person who would recognize unfamiliar handwriting on a diagram faster than anyone else in that building. I didn't send it from an account with my name on it. I created something clean, something untraceable back to me directly, and I sent the screenshots with four words attached.

Worth checking the source.

Then I closed my laptop and went to practice, and I didn't check my phone again for six hours, because watching a fire you set burn is its own kind of tell, and I intended to be somewhere else entirely when this one caught.

Maya called me that night, breathless, before I'd even had the chance to look.

"Something's happening at Crestwood," she said. "Marcus pulled Jace out of film session today. Sienna too, separately. Nobody knows why yet, but people are talking."

"About what," I said, keeping my voice even, though something in my chest had started moving very fast.

"About whether Sienna actually came up with that defensive breakdown she presented last month," Maya said. "Somebody apparently flagged it. Compared it to old game plans. There's a rumor going around that the handwriting doesn't match anything Sienna's ever turned in."

I closed my eyes and let myself feel it for exactly one moment, the particular satisfaction of watching a structure I'd quietly reinforced with truth instead of anger begin to buckle under its own weight. Then I put the feeling away, because satisfaction wasn't useful yet. Not until I saw how it landed.

"Do they think it was Jace who fed it to her," I asked.

"Some people think that," Maya said. "Some people think Sienna copied it off something she found. Nobody's saying your name yet, if that's what you're asking."

That was exactly what I'd been asking, and hearing the answer settled something in my chest that had been tight since the moment I sent the message. I hadn't wanted my name attached to this. I wanted the truth to arrive on its own, without a face people could point to and call jealous, without a story people could shrink down into a girl trying to punish an ex over a breakup instead of what it actually was.

"What's Jace saying," I asked.

"Nothing, according to everyone," Maya said. "He's apparently been quiet all day. Which for Jace is basically a five alarm fire."

I thought about him sitting somewhere in that building, feeling the ground shift under him for maybe the first time in his life, discovering exactly how uncomfortable it felt to have something taken apart in front of an audience instead of quietly, in private, the way he'd always assumed problems simply resolved themselves for people like him.

"This is just the first thing," I said, mostly to myself.

"What do you mean, first thing," Maya said.

I looked down at my phone, at the folder still sitting closed, at the video I hadn't touched and wasn't ready to touch yet. There was still so much they didn't know I had. The affair itself, still unconfirmed publicly. The full thread of messages, still mostly private. The particular sentence about my notebook, still unheard by anyone except Maya and me.

"I mean I'm not finished," I said. "I just wanted them to feel it start."

Maya was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line, and when she spoke again there was something careful in her voice, something close to awe. "You scare me a little bit right now. In a good way. I think."

I almost laughed, the first real laugh I'd let myself have in over a week. "Good," I said. "Let them feel that too, eventually."

Somewhere across town, in a building I used to call home, a small crack had opened in a story two people had built carefully enough to survive almost anyone else's scrutiny. They didn't know it yet, but they'd built it to survive everyone except the one person who actually knew where every seam had been sewn.

That person was done sitting quietly in the stands.