Just after curfew that night, I climb the attic stairs to meet Caleb on the roof.
The wind has grown even more bitter than it was earlier, and it threatens to toss me over the side on my way to the spire. When I see him sitting on the ledge where we met last time, my steps slow, and I’m torn between wanting to punch him or to curl up in his arms.
He stands when he sees my expression, his hands in his pockets.
“Wasn’t sure you were coming,” he says.
We didn’t have a chance to talk after I got back from the internship, and texting that I was going to be late might have alerted Moore or Belk, who have access to our phones.
“Grayson wanted to play another game of Road Racers.”
A muscle tics in Caleb’s neck, and he looks to the ground, hiding his expression.
“Are you okay?” His question is steady, too practiced.
“Yes. Are you?”
“I’m fine.”
Fine. The word digs beneath my skin.
I step closer. He does not.
“Why did you follow me tonight?” I ask.
A shocked sigh slips out of his lips, like he didn’t see this coming. It puts me even more on edge. He should have expected this question, and acting like he didn’t confirms he’s hiding something.
He zips up his coat, putting a leather shield between us. “I thought you were working at a restaurant, not hanging out at one.”
He isn’t even going to try to deny he was tailing me. I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.
“I am. At least, I was until you decided to show.” Mark’s going to be mad when he sobers up. Any chance I had of hearing what he knows about Jimmy is gone. For all I know, he could be planning on telling Jessica about the donation game and getting me fired.
“Seriously?” Caleb stares at me. “Sorry. Didn’t realize you guys were having such a good time.”
Now it’s my turn for the shield. I feel Devon Park Brynn slide over my skin, lifting my chin and straightening my spine.
“I had it handled.”
“Maybe you did,” he says. “But I see anyone getting dragged around a parking lot by a guy like that, I’m going to say something.”
Myra’s words echo in my head: It’s those who let people like him get away with things that are the problem.
Caleb wasn’t trying to mess things up on my job—aside from touching my face, he never even acknowledged that we knew each other. He was protecting me the way he’d protect anyone, and even if that makes me feel like the worst kind of scum, that still doesn’t explain why he was there tonight.
“What were you doing with those people?” he asks before I can, and there’s a carefulness to his tone that sets me on edge. “Those older guys. That girl … Do you even know who they are?”
The anger in his voice catches me off guard. “Do you?”
He shoves at his glasses.
Dread snakes through my veins.
“Why were you following me?” I ask again. “Why do you know them? Shouldn’t you be on your own assign—”
“I was.” He hesitates, and I see the truth in his struggle. He knows who the people I was with are because they are his assignment. He said he was following a new recruit, a girl.
But he was following me.
A sudden pressure pulses between my temples. It wouldn’t be the first time I was the focus of someone’s job—Geri’s whole purpose last year was to play me according to Dr. O’s bidding. Caleb himself tailed me before I was accepted to Vale Hall to make sure I was suitable for the program.
But the recruitment angle is over. Dr. O said to keep my assignment a secret, to tell the others I was following a potential new student if anyone asked. He must have told Caleb the same.
Caleb followed the rules, and I didn’t. And now Caleb’s asking questions he already knows the answers to, like this is some kind of test to see what I’ll give up.
“They’re just interns,” I say. “Or coworkers. But I guess you knew that.”
He’s quiet a moment, and then he closes in on me, fast enough that I step back. He’s different now, back to himself. He reaches for my hands, grasping them tightly. Worry is etched into every line on his face, and his frown pulls at my heart.
“This is me,” he says. “I’m not some mark.”
But I am.
Caleb and I faced the Wolves of Hellsgate together. We sent Pete, the man who made my life a living nightmare, to prison. I’ve met his mom and his brother. I’ve seen his dad.
We don’t have secrets.
“Just tell me what’s going on,” he says.
But he already knows. I told him about The Loft. About Sterling’s missing intern.
And he lied.
“I can’t talk about it,” I say.
He releases my hands.
“What can we talk about? Everything’s off-limits because Grayson’s always crawling all over you.”
Irritation prickles between my shoulder blades. He gets to pull this after following me to work? After spying on me? “That’s kind of an exaggeration, don’t you think?”
“He likes you.”
“I’m making him like me. It’s part of the job.”
“The job,” he repeats, and then laughs coldly. “Yeah, it’s more than the job. He looks at you like … I don’t know. Like he owns you or something.”
“So kind of the way Geri’s been looking at you.”
“That’s different,” he says. “She’s just—”
“Being Geri, I know.” It irritates me that he thinks I let her get to me, even if I have a little. “Grayson doesn’t own me.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” A gust of wind howls through the pointed mountains of the roof, throwing me off balance. Caleb grabs my elbow to steady me, but his gaze is flat, hiding secrets, and it makes me doubt myself yet again. Did he follow me tonight as part of his assignment? Or was it personal—he wanted to see for himself what I was really up to?
His arm falls slowly to his side, and I feel my insides twist.
“Do you?” he asks quietly, and I know he isn’t just talking about Grayson, but Dr. O as well.
Do they own me?
The fight drains out of me as the words from Othello ring in my head.
I do perceive here a divided duty.
On one side I have school—my assignment, my “education.” On the other, I have Caleb. I have Charlotte and Henry and Sam. SATs. College. My real life.
Which is becoming more of a lie every day.
It’s like jamming two wrong puzzle pieces together until they fit.
Caleb takes a step back, brows drawn together. His frustration, his worry, is replaced by something heavier, something I can touch through the wall that’s just lifted between us.
“This doesn’t work if you don’t trust me,” he says.
It feels like my chest is caving in. “Do you trust me?”
He flinches. “You need to be careful, Brynn.” He doesn’t say Margot’s name, but I feel her presence between us. He thinks I’m in too deep with my mark. That I’m going to betray him, like she did, or maybe that I already have.
He really doesn’t trust me.
“That’s not an answer,” I say quietly.
“Yes, it is,” he says. “It’s just not the one either of us want to hear.”
He won’t look at me.
“So that’s it?” I say, seeing red. “We’re doing whatever Dr. O says now? We don’t get our own lives?”
“We’re doing this so we can have our own lives.”
“No,” I say. “You’re doing this because you’re afraid.”
“Of course I’m afraid!” he shouts, and for one second, I’m relieved that this is hurting him as much as it is me. Then he says, “We should take a step back for a while.”
A fist clenches around my heart.
“You’re breaking up with me?”
He looks like I’m the one who just hurt him. “Maybe for now … it’s for the best.”
“For now? Is there a better time for you? You can pencil me in for next spring, how about that?”
He doesn’t answer.
I want to rage at him. I want to tell him we’re better than this. Stronger than this. That Grayson, and our assignments, and Margot’s stupid memory aren’t enough to shove us down.
But they are, because Caleb’s hands are tied. He needs Vale Hall more than I do, more than any of us do. If he doesn’t follow Dr. O’s directives, he gets kicked out of school. His dad loses his medical care. His mom can’t afford it on her cleaning job wages.
My future depends on this place, but Caleb’s family’s lives are counting on him.
If he’s lying to me, he doesn’t have a choice.
But if he’s lying to me, we can’t trust each other.
I lift my chin, unwilling to let him see me suffer.
“I have to get back,” I say. “Henry heard Moore say he’s doing room checks after curfew.”
Caleb’s head falls forward. He doesn’t try to stop me.
MY FEET FEEL like cinder blocks as I trudge through the attic and down the ladder into the storage room. I keep looking back, like he’s going to be there. I keep waiting to hear him call my name, to hear him say this was a mistake.
But he doesn’t follow me. He doesn’t confess anything.
And I don’t turn back, either.
I try to move faster, to escape the fist squeezing my lungs, but I can’t. He gave me his trust, but it came with strings attached. A disclaimer in the fine print I didn’t bother to read. He was mine, as long as it didn’t interfere with his job. He could only be honest to a point.
And the worst part is, I knew it the whole time. I never would have asked him to put me before his family.
As I open the storage room door, I run smack into someone and bite back a surprised yelp.
It’s Sam, but he rebounds off the door without looking at me and mumbles something I can’t make out as he disappears around the corner.
It hits me wrong, and so instead of going straight to my room at the end of the hall, I stop next door, at Charlotte’s.
Quietly, I knock twice, and before my knuckles strike the wood a third time, the door jerks inward.
She’s wearing a tank top and flannel pants, and her pale face is streaked with tears.
“Oh.” Her disappointment is obvious. As she turns away I slip inside her room, closing the door behind me.
“What’s going on?” I replay Sam’s hurried departure and grumbled words in my mind. They must have had a fight. Maybe she thought he was coming back when I knocked.
“Nothing,” she says. Then, “Life just sucks, you know? It’s like a giant vacuum cleaner in a black hole, inside a supernova black hole.”
She buries her face in her hands and starts to sob.
I’m not very good at the whole comforting thing, but seeing Charlotte in pain sucks worse than my own double black hole vacuum cleaner. In a few strides, I’m sitting beside her on the bed, one arm wrapped around her shoulders.
“What happened?”
“Oh, you know,” she says. “He loves me.”
“Okay,” I say slowly. “I’m missing the part where this is a problem.”
“NYU doesn’t have a good law school,” Charlotte says on a hiccup. “Southern Cal has a great pre-law placement, but we can’t do this three thousand miles apart.”
I’m surprised it’s only college madness. With the kinds of lives we lead, it could be anything.
“People do long-distance relationships all the time.”
Of course, I can’t even manage one with a guy who lives in the same house, but whatever.
She shakes her head, which makes me think there’s more to this story. If they decide to break up, they still have almost an entire year together before they go their separate ways.
“Unless that’s not what you want,” I say.
Her bottom lip quivers as she looks to me. “I don’t know what I want.”
The part of my heart Caleb hasn’t crushed breaks for Sam.
“This might be harsh,” I tell her. “But if you aren’t all in, he deserves to know.”
She stares forward at the door, a blank expression taking over her face as her shoulders stop quaking. “I get a life, don’t I?”
“Of course.” I squeeze her shoulder. Now I’m feeling rotten for both of them. “If it helps, I think Caleb and I just broke up.”
Charlotte’s head snaps my direction, and she blows out a long breath.
“Your call or his?”
“His,” I say. “I don’t know. Maybe both.”
I am heavy enough to sink through this mattress and through the floor below. My eyes burn and I blink back the tears. If I cry it will be real. It will be over.
“This calls for chocolate.” She pulls out the giant bag of M&M’s from her nightstand and spills them on her comforter. I eat about fifty before I realized Charlotte hasn’t even had one.
I stay with her until we hear Moore’s steps outside, then I return to my room and lie awake, leafing through Caleb’s drawings of skyscrapers, hospitals, and me, sketched into his copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I bury the book along with his trust in the bottom of my nightstand drawer and then press the heels of my hands to my eyes until I can’t hear Charlotte crying through the wall anymore.