Page 3 of What We Become

The mortar makes another wet scrape across the brick.

“You knew he’d chosen me.”

“I knew before you reached the party. Brock told me Amy wouldn’t shut up about you and Tyler was taking forever to train her. He wanted to show Tyler how it was done.”

“And you were, what? Waiting at home to fuck him in celebration after he’d abused me?” I think back to the lighthearted text Milo told me arrived on Brock’s phone that night—something like “waiting for you” with an eggplant emoji.

He smiles like he’s revisiting a fond memory. “Abusing women is quite the aphrodisiac.”

“You’re sick.”

“No.” His eyes go wide. “You’re sick. You were all too ready to leave that party with him. Don’t you dare cry victim just because he was willing to give you what you wanted and you changed your stupid mind.”

“I agreed to walk home! I didn’t ask him to put his dick in my mouth!”

His hand shoots through the gap in the plastic and hits me square in the jaw.

The impact snaps my head sideways, pain blooming hot across my face. My teeth click together so hard it blurs my vision, and I taste copper—blood, from where I bit my cheek.

“Don’t,” he says, his voice still soft, still Jamie, “misrepresent the situation—especially when I know how much you like dick, you little whore. You should be honored he even considered you.”

My ears are ringing. I work my jaw experimentally, checking if it still opens. It does, barely, with a grinding protest.

“Honored?” I laugh at that. “Jesus. You must have really been in love with the guy. How pathetic. He runs around town, abusing women and bragging about it to his buddies. And meanwhile, you’re hidden away from public view, ass up in the air hoping he’ll come back home and still have enough in the tank to fuck you when he’s gotten his fill. Path-et-ic.”

This time he ignores my jab. His nostrils flare.

“No wonder he ghosted you.”

“No!” His hands slam against the half-built wall. The plastic shudders around me. “He didn’t leave. You know that. I know that.”

“He’s been posting this entire time.”

“Those posts aren’t his.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I knew Brock better than anyone.” The words come out hard and immediate. “He couldn’t take a selfie that wasn’t sixty percent nostril unless I held the phone. Then he supposedly abandons everyone and suddenly every photograph is perfect? Perfect lighting. Perfect angles. Punctuation he never used?”

He picks up the trowel again.

“Your tech boyfriend scrubbed the files until nothing pointed back to Brock’s phone. That was his mistake. Brock never did anything that clean.”

Milo always says no one looks at metadata.

Stephen did.

“Maybe someone in his new life takes the pictures.”

His eyes narrow. “Stop lying. You know too much to backtrack now. You’re a fucking liar.”

“I’m not.”

“I saw you the next morning.”

The trowel starts moving again.

“At the diner,” he says. “You poured coffee over my hand because you were too busy staring out the window. You were shaking. You flinched every time someone moved too fast. You apologized four times for a spill that didn’t matter.”