Chapter 21
The second year began with rain.
Soft, persistent rain that glazed the rooftops and turned the stone courtyards of Saint Aramond's into slick, gleaming mirrors. The energy around campus shifted with the returning students, some older, some simply changed. Among them, Michael stood watching from the arch near the student commons, dry under the eaves, his hood drawn low over his eyes.
He'd been quiet for months since the alley fight. Quiet, but not still.
He had a plan, and Jason was at the center of it.
Not because of the old bruises, not even because of Emma—though that lingered like a bitter aftertaste. No, Michael had learned things. Whispers, rumors. Jason was not just a student with a rough past. He had contacts, connections, and there were nights he disappeared into the city and returned with eyes like stone.
Michael had watched. Followed. Asked questions.
And slowly, the pieces began to form.
Jason was involved in something deeper, darker. Maybe it was small crime, maybe something worse. But Michael saw opportunity. If he could expose Jason, it wouldn't just be revenge—it would be his own redemption. He began recruiting, not fighters, not cowards, but students with motives. A small circle. Trustworthy, resentful. And hungry.
He called them together beneath the old clocktower after curfew. They met in whispers, scribbled notes passed in books. They watched. Waited.
---
Meanwhile, Andrew found comfort in the smallest of habits.
He and Kate now spent their afternoons in the reading room behind the chapel—a quiet space with tall arched windows and velvet chairs that sank beneath your weight like confession. They read in silence, occasionally sharing lines of poetry, or their own writing.
They never called it friendship, but it was. A soft, strange companionship built on unspoken pain and small kindnesses.
Andrew still sketched. He still wrote.
But he didn't speak of Emma.
Kate noticed. She also noticed that he smiled more when they sat alone by the frozen lake behind the school, watching the last of winter dissolve.
"What are you thinking?" she asked him once, as they shared a pastry and watched ducks pick their way through the icy shallows.
"That if I didn't come back after break, no one would notice."
Kate reached over, took the last bite from his hand. "I would."
He blinked.
"That counts for something," she added with a shrug.
And it did.
---
Jason, meanwhile, had grown distant.
Emma felt it in the way his touch lingered less, in the way his phone always buzzed late at night, in the way he seemed half-present even when lying beside her. There was always somewhere he had to go. Someone he had to meet. His answers were vague. His kisses distracted.
"You're never here anymore," she said one evening, arms folded, jacket pulled tight around her as they stood by the vending machines in the student lobby.
Jason didn't look at her. "I'm handling stuff."
"What kind of stuff?"
"It's not about you."
"But I'm part of your life, aren't I?"
Jason sighed. "Emma, not everything needs to be explained. You said you liked the mystery, remember?"
She flinched. That had been true once.
"People change," she said.
Jason looked at her for a long moment. Then gave a slow, almost cruel smile. "Yeah. They do."
---
Michael, in the meantime, was circling tighter.
He had photos. Notes. He had a time and a place. He knew Jason's contacts. He knew the alleyways he disappeared into and the men he met there—older men, not students. Sometimes in cars. Sometimes in suits.
He needed a moment to strike.
One night, he saw Jason slip out through the back gates, toward the edge of town. He followed at a distance.
He saw Jason hand over a package.
He took a picture.
That was all he needed.
---
Back on campus, Andrew walked Kate back from the library beneath a sky full of constellations.
"Do you think we're pretending?" she asked suddenly.
"Pretending what?"
"That this is enough. That we're not both thinking about people who don't think about us."
Andrew slowed his steps. "Maybe."
"Does that make us pathetic?"
He smiled faintly. "I think it makes us human."
She exhaled, her breath curling in the air. Then she gently bumped her shoulder into his. "Let's keep pretending a little longer."
He didn't answer, but he didn't pull away.
---
Emma sat alone in her dorm later that night.
Jason hadn't come back.
She stared at her phone, thumb hovering over Andrew's name. She didn't call. She wouldn't. She had made her choice. Even if now it felt like a ghost pressing against her ribs.
Instead, she wrote a poem she never sent.
[You loved me quietly, While I loved like thunder— And never noticed The silence behind the sound.]
She folded the page, tucked it into her desk.
And cried.
---
Jason returned near dawn, his face unreadable.
When Emma asked where he'd been, he just said, "Don't."
She didn't press.
But the silence grew louder.
And outside the chapel, Michael smiled.
He had everything he needed.
[ ]-these would now be used to represent poems
( )-these would represent thoughts
" "these would represent dialogue or " "