Chapter 4

A sharp knock on the window pulled Paige out of her thoughts.

Riley stood outside with a plastic bag in her good hand, rain misting across her shoulders. Paige rolled the window down.

“It was packed in there,” Riley said, glancing both ways at the wet lot. “The storm's not letting up until at least five in the morning. Everything’s going to stay backed up.”

Paige let out a slow breath. Eight more hours of congested roads. Of sharing this car. Of not being able to put any real distance between them.

“So it’s just us until the hospital,” she said.

Riley didn’t flinch at the words. She only set the bag on the roof of the car and reached for the hem of her ruined shirt. The motion was practical, nothing performative, but the gas station lights left no shadows to hide in.

She pulled the bloodied fabric up and over her head in one careful movement. Underneath she wore a black sports bra, the kind meant for long practices and hard drills. It sat against the clean lines of her shoulders and the narrow taper of her waist, the athletic shape of someone who spent more hours on the field than anywhere else. Strong, balanced, unmistakably hers.

Paige looked away a second too late.

Riley’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “See something interesting?”

“Just calculating how much that shirt cost me,” Paige answered, keeping her voice even. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

Riley huffed once, the sound almost familiar, and pulled the new shirt from the bag. It was a cheap, oversized tank in pale gray with bright pink lettering that read See You Later, Alligator across the chest—the kind of thing a parent might wear to a child’s weekend game. On Riley it looked deliberately wrong, almost funny, the soft fabric hanging loose over the sharp edges of her frame.

She tugged it down and opened the passenger door.

“We should get moving,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to miss the window at the shop.”

Paige turned the key. As they rolled out from under the fluorescent lights and back into the dark, she caught the ghost of something softer, a smile perhaps, right at the corner of Riley’s mouth before it disappeared.

They drove in silence for a long stretch. The headlights cut a narrow path through the rain. Ten minutes felt longer than they should have. Every so often Paige felt the weight of Riley’s presence the way she used to—close, unreadable, impossible to ignore completely. A few months had been enough to learn the shape of that silence. Apparently it was also enough to remember it too clearly.

When she finally pulled into the nearly empty parking lot of a grocery store that was still open, Riley gave her a look that needed no translation.

“You’re serious.”

“I need to eat,” Paige said. “I’m not surviving the rest of this night on vending-machine chips and whatever guilt you’re still carrying.”

Riley glanced toward the back seat where the twisted motorcycle took up most of the space. “And where exactly are the bags supposed to go? My lap’s not available unless you’ve developed a sudden taste for blood.”

“I’m getting one thing. It’ll sit with me.” Paige held out her phone. “Call Gomez. Schedule the repair so your parents never see a receipt. If I catch you doing anything else on that screen—especially scrolling through old messages—I’m leaving you on the curb. Clear?”

Riley took the phone, expression flat but not quite as closed as before. She had always been good at absorbing threats; sports had trained that into her early. Still, something in the way she nodded felt different now that the history between them was no longer something that Paige was deliberately suppressing.

“Clear.”

Paige stepped out into the mist. Behind her, through the rain-streaked glass, she could see Riley already lifting the phone to her ear. The cheap pink letters on the new shirt caught the store’s outdoor light for a second, absurd and ordinary at once.

A few months. That was all it had been. Long enough to know the sound of Riley’s voice when she was trying not to care. Long enough to recognize the careful distance she was putting between them now. And somehow still long enough that sitting in a car with her on a ruined night felt like standing too close to something that had never fully cooled.

Paige pushed the grocery store door open and didn’t look back.