Mia POV
I do not sleep after the phone call.
I lie in bed, stare at the ceiling, listen to the city outside my window, and think about three words.
Longer than last night.
Nathan De Voss, CEO, thirty-two, son of the man my mother owes money to, knew about me before I walked across that room. Before the dare. Before the bottle even stopped spinning.
He knew.
I turn that over and over in my head, looking for the shape of it. Was last night a setup? Did he come to that club because of me? Did he sit in that corner on purpose, positioned where I would see him, waiting?
But then I think about his face when I held out my hand. That three-second pause. The way he looked at me was like he was checking if I was sure.
That was not the face of someone running a plan.
That was the face of someone surprised by their own answer.
I pick up my phone at 6 a.m. The video has ninety thousand views.
I put my phone face down.
I get up. I shower. I make toast, I do not eat. I put on my backpack, and I go to class, because my mother works double shifts to pay for this degree, and I am not letting a video ruin a Monday.
The campus feels different the second I walk through the gate.
Not loud, almost the opposite. There is a specific kind of quiet that happens when people are watching you and pretending not to. I have felt it once before, in eighth grade, when a rumor went around about me that was not true. That particular silence has a texture. Like static before a storm.
I keep my chin up. Eyes forward.
A girl I recognize from my Tuesday lecture looks at me from across the path, then looks away fast. Two boys near the fountain say something to each other, and one of them laughs. I do not look at them. I do not change my pace.
I get to my first class and sit in my usual seat.
My phone buzzes. I look.
Jenna: Hey, things are kind of crazy. Can we talk later?
That is Jenna-speak for I cannot be seen publicly supporting you right now. We have been friends for a year. She brought me soup when I was sick in October. I put my phone away.
Twenty minutes later, another buzz.
Sophie: So I saw the thing. Are you okay?
I start to type back. Then I see Sophie has posted on her story this morning, Becca's post, reshared with a little shocked-face emoji. No comment. Just the reshare.
I close the message without answering.
Third buzz. My friend Cam, who is in my study group, with whom I have eaten lunch every Wednesday for two months:
Hey, just a heads up, I think it's better if we don't hang out for a bit. Just until things quiet down. You know how it is.
I stare at that one for longer than the others.
You know how it is.
I do know how it is. It is just that knowing how it is does not make it hurt less. It is still your name being turned into a story people tell. It is still three people who call themselves your friends deciding their comfort matters more than yours, all before nine a.m. on a Monday.
I put my phone in my bag and leave it there.
The morning passes. I take notes. I answer a question in my second lecture that I know the answer to, and my voice comes out steady, and that feels like a small private victory nobody else can see.
At noon, I find a bench at the edge of campus away from the main paths, under a tree that drops leaves on my head. I eat half my sandwich. I check my phone.
Seventeen missed calls. All Kyle.
Becca's story is still up. She has added to it a second slide now, a screenshot of the video with the caption: when you need to outshine the birthday cake by going after family.
Four hundred shares.
I look at the sky through the tree branches for a moment.
Then I open my blocked contacts list.
Kyle is not on it yet.
He calls on the eighteenth try. I watch the screen light up. I watch it go to voicemail. I watch it light up again, nineteenth. Then twentieth.
I pick up on the twenty-first.
"Finally." His voice is tight and clipped, the way it gets when he has been stewing for hours and has run out of patience for his own feelings. "Do you have any idea?"
"Happy birthday to me," I say.
Silence.
"Mia." He recalibrates. I can hear the shift from angry to controlled-angry, which is the version he thinks is more persuasive. "I have been trying to reach you since last night. We need to talk about what you did."
"What I did," I repeat.
"You walked into a back room with my uncle. In front of everyone I know. In front of phones." A pause. "Do you understand how that looks for my family?"
I sit very still on my bench.
"Kyle," I say. "You kissed a girl."
"Through a piece of tissue paper."
"On my birthday." My voice is quiet. I am not going to shout. I decided that this morning. Shouting lets people say you were hysterical. "You kissed someone else. You did not text me happy birthday. You did not save me a seat. And then when I got there, you let your friends dare me and call me uptight and tell me to prove I was fun." I pause. "And now you are calling to tell me how I embarrassed your family."
A long silence.
I wait.
"You chose my uncle," he says, finally. And underneath the anger, there is something raw, something that sounds almost young. "Out of every person in that room, you walked past me, and you chose him."
"Yes," I say. "I did."
"Why?"
"Because he was the only person there who wasn't laughing at me."
Another silence. Longer this time.
Then his voice shifts back harder, the rawness gone, something colder taking its place. "He's not who you think he is, Mia. Nathan doesn't do anything without a reason. If he paid attention to you, it was because"
"Goodbye, Kyle," I say.
"Mia"
I hang up.
I open my contacts.
I find his name.
I block the number.
It takes about four seconds. It should feel bigger than four seconds, two years, reduced to one tap. But my thumb comes down, and his name goes grey, and that is that. I sit with it for a moment. My chest feels strange, not broken, not relieved. Something in between. Like setting down a bag you have been carrying so long you forgot it was heavy.
I pick up my sandwich.
I finish it.
The afternoon is better than the morning. Not good, but better. I keep my head down in my last lecture, copy everything off the board, and do not look at my phone. I talk to no one. I am a person going to class on a Monday, and if I do that well enough and long enough, the rest of it will eventually stop mattering.
I almost believe it.
I walk home the long way through the side streets, away from campus, where nobody from school goes in the afternoons. The light is already fading, that early-evening grey that comes in October, and the streets smell like cold air and food from the restaurant on the corner. Normal things. Real things.
I turn onto my street.
I stop.
There is a black car parked directly outside my building.
Not unusual on its own, people park on this street all the time: visitors, delivery drivers, neighbors with guests. But this car is not a neighbor's car, and it is not a delivery driver. It is long and dark and too clean for this street, and behind the wheel, there is a figure I cannot see clearly in this light, and the car has been running; I can see the faint exhaust in the cold air, which means someone is sitting in it, engine on, waiting.
Waiting for what?
Waiting for who?
I stand on the pavement half a block away and hold very still, the way you go still when you cannot yet tell if something is dangerous or just unexpected. My heart is going faster than it should. I think about the video and its hundred thousand views. I think about Kyle's last words before I hung up. Nathan doesn't do anything without a reason. I think about the debt, the files, longer than last night.
The driver's door opens.
A figure steps out.
The light from the streetlamp reaches his face.
Nathan De Voss leans against the side of his car, hands in his jacket pockets, and looks down the street at me with that expression I am already learning, the one that is not quite neutral, not quite open. The one that means he has been thinking.
He waited.
He came to my building, parked, and waited for me to come home.
My feet start moving before I decide to let them.
Halfway down the block, I stop again.
Because behind Nathan, the apartment building door is opening.
And my mother is stepping out.
She sees the car first. Then Nathan.
Then she looks at me, and her face does something I have never seen it do before.
She looks afraid.