Dear Dex,

I know what it's like to feel forgotten.

It's like you're trapped behind a two-way mirror, right? You fog up the glass with your breath so everyone else is just as removed from you as you are from them, but it's no use. The fog fades. The glass still doesn't break. You're invisible to them and they're out of reach to you. All your efforts to cause some damage to them are useless. Unnoticed.

Yeah, I get it.

You'll be blaming yourself for my disappearance, right? Because of Rex?

I want to tell you that it's okay to cry. You won't hear it from behind the glass, but I promise I said it. I promise I see you.

Just make sure the tears aren't because you blame yourself for me leaving. It wasn't your fault you were too scared of me (I don't care that I didn't feel your fear. You had to have been scared of me. I only detect head emotions, not heart). That was part of the reason I left, your fear (which I can say because you won't ever see this so I don't have to lie) but mostly, it was so I didn't hurt you more.

You know who your emotions match in our little group? A lot of the time, your feelings are similar to Stina's. Marella, Fitz, yes, but you and Stina have a special sort of anger brewing inside of you, and I don't think anyone else sees how deep it goes.

I think she needs that anger to keep going. I don't think you do.

Knowing that Rex was talentless, I think, made that anger worse. And, yeah, I could feel the resentment aimed at me. It's fine.

I don't blame you, and you shouldn't blame yourself.

Blame me instead, okay? I know you already do. The guilt wouldn't break me even if I were there to feel it.

The guilt is never what breaks me.

I would love to tell you I know you. I'm supposed to know everyone, aren't I? But you are terrifyingly accomplished at hiding yourself away. I told you earlier that I only read head emotions, not ones from the heart, and that's true.

I can't read you for the same reason you kissed Sophie: you are very, very good at convincing yourself to feel things that you don't want to. Your obsession with Sophie, guilt for things everyone has forgiven you for, and above all, how much you care. You care so much. It's kind of incredible, because I didn't know someone could want to make people happy so much and still believe he's a horrible person.

Take it from an Empath: you have been forgiven many times over.

I can tell you this because I haven't been forgiven, and I probably won't be for a long time, not until I'm a distant enough memory that you only remember the good times instead of the ending. Or... the endings, since I like repeating my mistakes.

The good thing about being trapped behind two-way glass is that you get to know everyone so well that nothing they do surprises you. The bad thing is that no one notices when you cry.

Thank you for trying your best with a lost cause.

Love,

Keefe

...

"You must be lost," Keefe said from his usual spot in the bleached white hallway, arms stretched out behind his head, sprawled across the bench like he owned it. This, he'd learned from his father: pretend things belong to you so that no one takes them away.

The girl shuffled back, eyeing him up and down. And he felt it, the curiosity, the nerves, a twinge of pain, all strong enough to make it through the wall that he'd built up over the past few months. Construction had begun just around the time Fitz stopped entering his mind during school, and now he was constantly reinforcing it. But her emotions were strong enough to penetrate his makeshift shield (it was cobbled together from tired debris), the only reason he said anything at all.

"How did you know?"

And there: he was hit with a wave of confusion, trepidation, interest. Things he hadn't bothered to identify in too long.

"It's the middle of session," he pointed out. "Either you're lost, or you're ditching—and clearly you're not ditching." He knew that this time; could pinpoint the way she held her wrist too carefully. Using his Empathy for something outside of class was like stretching a muscle that he hadn't realized he'd been neglecting.

"Why couldn't I be ditching?" she asked, a mystery coming unwrapped. Defensiveness, irritation, still more curiosity, bemusement.

"Are you?"

"No," she admitted. And Keefe wondered at it for a second, wondered at the ease with which his mind had slipped into numbness, into a brick wall. And the ease, even more, which this girl—Sophie Foster, Fitz had told him— had broken it down with her vibrant, swirling emotions. They felt like they were flecked with gold, little pinpricks scraping against his skin and peeling down his wall a layer at a time.

She was safe, maybe. Safer than all the disappointment and anger, Alden's pride in him, the dangerous direction Fitz's emotions had been turning, all the things he couldn't control or do anything about. All the reasons he started numbing himself in the first place.

"You're the new girl, aren't you?"

Sophie hesitated, then nodded.

He eyed her again, reminding himself to commit her to memory in case he ever needed her later. Maybe, he considered wryly to himself, he was more like his father than he wanted to admit. "I'm Keefe."

...

It's happening again.

This time, it feels more intentional. As in, Keefe doesn't exactly try to stop the numbness from leeching through his blood. Perhaps there's a half-hearted attempt to stall it; he hasn't been going out in crowds. Submerging himself in people like that would speed up the process. Maybe he hopes it will. He isn't quite sure about his feelings on the matter.

He'd heard before now that numbness took away your ability to feel other emotions or tell them apart from your own. He hadn't known that he would stop being able to identify his own.

Glittery gold dances through his vision when he closes his eyes. That's always how he knows her, by feel more than sight. That's how he knows everyone. That's the only way he knows them.

Maybe that's why he keeps his eyes shut, trying to pinpoint the gold, the wave of emotions that always comes when she's close, getting stronger with determination and hope and fear and—

There's a knock at the door.

Keefe shoots bolt upright.

And now he knows that the hope doesn't belong to him (because he thought he already lost all of his, so how could he be convinced he had any left?) because that's her knock, the one he knows, the one he's been able to memorize over the years of her barging into places she shouldn't be.

As soon as he opens the door, she's throwing her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder, and he catches her like the sand catches an anchor. It hurts to breathe as her shoulders shake a little, and he sees Tam and Dex waiting behind her through blurred eyes.

So he slips back into who they expect him to be.

(I'm happy to see you, Foster, really, but I do need to breathe—)

Sophie lets him go and to his surprise, Dex replaces her, bony elbows digging into his sides in a comforting weight.

"Sorry," he says in a rush, like Keefe knew he would. "I never meant for you to leave. I thought we could find something." But something in him is stretched, desperate. Keefe squeezes him tightly and lets him go, raising an eyebrow at Tam in teasing expectation. He makes a sarcastic face and shakes his head.

But, later, after explanations, Tam's gentle as he removes the tracker. His gaze is soft, accusation blunted with relief as the shadowflux drops into the empty waterbottle and disappears into the trash.

Maybe that's part of why Keefe decides to come back. It's the wanting, the loneliness, the empty room, the numbness (Sophie chases it away with her vivid feeling), and it's the selfishness that makes him leave with them. He is always selfish.

So Keefe abandons the note and the letter sitting next to each other on the couch, pen rolling away into the cushions. And he tries; he really tries to forget about them.

The one in his messy, slanting handwriting, riddled with spelling mistakes and crossed-off words where he rethought himself even though Fitz wouldn't be seeing it, even though none of them would be reading the letters he'd written for each of them over the course of the month. He'd finished Dex's earlier and only now managed to get through everyone else's, all the ones he'd left for last because they were the hardest to figure out.

And the other paper, in an elegant, refined script. Signed in print and in cursive, in English instead of the Enlightened Language because of course she would know that he's a polyglot now.

The one signed, Mom.