“The piece from two seasons ago,” I say. “About you. About the ghost. I wrote it.” My voice is steady. I don’t know how. “Under a pen name. V. North. I came here knowing I wrote it and I didn’t tell you and I’ve been carrying that since day one.”
He goes still.
Not the crease stillness. Something else.
“Griffin fed me the angle,” I say. “I didn’t know what he was doing until it was too late. I ran it anyway. I was wrong. I knew I was wrong the moment I sent it. And then I came here and I — I was trying to make it right. Not to fix it. Just to be better than that byline.”
He’s quiet for a long time.
“You should have told me.”
“I was protecting you.”
“From what.” Not a question. “My own story?”
“From the circus. From the—”
“Nova.”
Just my name.
I close my mouth.
He looks at the wall across the tunnel. Not at me. At the wall. I watch his hands — still on his knees, the scarred ones, the certain ones — and I wait for him to move. Stand up. Walk out. Do the thing people do when the room changes and there’s no fixing it.
He doesn’t move.
“I was scared,” I say. “Of being the reason something bad happens to you again. I thought if I could manage it quietly it wouldn’t touch you. I thought I could fix it before you ever had to know.”
“You handled it alone,” he says.
I flinch.
He keeps looking at the wall. “Same as the piece two years ago.”
He’s right.
“I’m not mad about the photos,” he says after a second. “I’m not mad about the piece.”
The celebration is three floors up. Down here it’s quiet enough that every word lands whole.
“I’m mad that when it got hard your instinct was to shut me out.”
I wait for him to stand.
He doesn’t.
Just sits there with his hands on his knees and his jaw set and all that hurt held so tight I can feel it from a foot away.
I have a script for the part where he leaves.
I don’t have one for this.
“Say something,” I say.
“I am.”
“That’s not helpful.”
