If I said he hadn't changed a bit, on the surface, I wouldn't be lying. I recognized his favorite shirt in the color of bottle green, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, from under which countless tattoos were exposed. Simple trousers, shiny shoes and black hair perfectly combed back, with a piece of it hanging over one of the thick eyebrows.

However, the glare coming from the dark green eyes, even from a distance of a few meters, seemed to come from a completely different soul. His face was not stone cold, and his eyes did not avoid mine.

Previously pensive he was looking through the high, oblong window of the living room. But in that moment, he was observing things he hadn't seen in me before. He frowned in mild surprise at the color of my hair and I noticed that he did not react like that to the stitches and wounds, certainly much more standing out of all things. He just swallowed, closing his mouth tightly for a moment. Apparently, he already knew.

"I heard what happened," he finally spoke, gently pointing to the wounds and reassuring me in my conviction. "I wanted to see if you were okay."

I couldn't stop the chill of the next few words. It could have been decades, and yet I would have seen all the past events from this place clearly as in the photographs. Kade was in one of those. Faded, with ragged edges, a shadow covering half of his face and a blonde companion wrapped around his waist.

"From Katiya?"

I knew he didn't hear about it from her. But I wanted to see his reaction, to find another answer to another question.

The guy, to my surprise, just sighed. That's all.

"From a friend. He works at the club behind the bar."

And all of a sudden, I lost my patience. Everything around me was changing too fast to just stop and stand still because of one person. The force of inertia at the stop would have pushed me further anyway.

"What are you doing here, Kade? For real."

Grief like a hazy glint of light reflected in his eyes. In the past, like me, he wouldn't have shown anything. Even a few months ago. However, Katiya began a multi-sided avalanche of constant changes, and the further it reached, the stronger its blow was.

Together with Kade we were at the very foot of the mountain.

"Then, at that party, you asked me for one conversation. We've never had it, so I want to make up for it."

I snorted, hiding nothing. Even before I left, I saw his facade crumble and his emotions come out. He felt more and wanted to be better. However, the few months that have passed since then have unexpectedly played a crucial role.

He wasn't the only one who got rid of the stone mask. He wasn't the only one who wanted to throw a billion words out of himself.

And neither of us had a dim idea of the effect that confrontation would have had at this particular moment. When two masks became none. When both personalities have changed. When both minds begged for freedom, stuck in the past.

"And you're coming now?" I asked with resentment, but I felt a strange deafness in my voice.

Kade looked down for the first time, and the expression was familiar.

There was an aching silence.

They were standing there together. Him and her. Two of the most pathetic people in this school. And all my assumptions were confirmed when I saw the triumphant, mean smile on the girl's face and the lack of any reaction from the guy. He knew I was here. He just wouldn't look at me, hugging the girl tightly at the waist.



And when he didn't make any movement, I snorted quietly, closing the trunk and slowly raising my hand to take off one glove. I turned the inside of my hand toward him with hatred and mist in my eyes.

He immediately lowered his gaze, giving me all the proof of what kind of person he was all this time. Or rather, what kind of person he wasn't.

Quiet enough that he could still hear me, I said clearly:

"Enjoy it, Kade. You won."



"It was  h i m  who told her. Not me."


I didn't say anything. I didn't speak up, wanting him to do it this one time.

Even though every voice in my head suddenly took on the form of a painful scream.

"Katiya..." he started to speak without looking up, but a sudden hoarseness of voice forced him to cough and start the sentence anew. "I could have done anything for her. One day, she made me devote to her completely. I decided to change everything in my life. I promised her that I would break off contact with you and become someone better."

I began to regret letting him speak. But I had to know. I had to. But allowing him to continue was harder than I thought. With a persistent ache in my cage, I kept on listening.

"The same day you locked her in the locker. The locker room attendant found her there a few hours after school was supposed to be closed."

I took a deep breath, not looking away. Even when Kade's eyes crossed mine. At the moment, there was an ambiguous pain out on their surface.

"I was so mad at you, soon after I told her about..."

"It was you," I said quietly, without a hint of surprise, interrupting his story. Blackness went down my throat. "I'm surprised Rita didn't lie to my face for once."

What else was the probable suspicion, and what else was the knowledge of the undeniable truth. The pain spread rapidly through my body and I involuntarily tensed my stomach. If not for the mental and physical exhaustion, the tears would have flowed again. But all I could feel was the pinching pain and the acid filling my lungs.

Estera created the memory, Kade told Katiya about it, she created the plan, and Rita helped make it happen.

I had too many thoughts in my head to speak, so Kade took advantage of it.

"When you came to school after the graduation party with your hands covered in bandages, I heard from Chris what happened. I was terrified to think that Katiya might have had anything to do with this. She wouldn't have gone that far, or at least that's what I thought." He closed his eyes for a moment, regaining his composure. Tired eyes fell to the floor. "Before I asked, she came to me and said that Rita was the one who locked you in that pool. I trusted Katiya, and her story made sense. I didn't even think to doubt it."

I frowned, noticing one unsaid element. One loophole in his story. The one I was no longer a part of.

I crossed my arms on my chest, embracing a more confident position. My muscles ached from the constant tension.

"So, what's changed?"

When he heard my question, all of a sudden, a strange, crooked smile crossed his face. He raised his head, and only then did the expression make sense. He was hiding tears in his eyes. It was the first time I saw Kade like this... stripped of boundaries, masks and lies.

He spread his arms, pointing to the space between us. Green eyes were filled with complete acceptance of fate. Whether I wanted to or not, I knew what he was getting at.

And then he said it:

"We did. All of us."

And I couldn't get rid of the weight that had fallen on us. Sudden, forging, and real to the core. I just stood there stuck to the floor. I looked out the window, not breathing.

Dots connected together by thick lines formed a completely different image. No room for theories and suspicions. It was a truth that I could either accept or naively reject, turning reality into a lie. All this time, nameless, has been blinding me, shooting in the eyes, swimming under my skin and clinging to my organs like poison.

Or medicine.

I had a choice. At that point it stopped being an illusion.

I didn't notice when Kade went into the hallway, put on his jacket and opened the front door. The only thing that woke me up was the sound of him twisting the doorknob.

I turned toward the exit, seeing his silhouette completely facing the door. Cold air fell in, though I barely felt it. It only took a second for Kade to say his last words.

They were soft, almost like silence itself.

"I'm sorry. For everything I didn't do."

And they were enough to overwhelm me with both old and brand-new pain.

I walked up a marble staircase that did not lead to the guest rooms, but to the part occupied by the owner of the house. The need to explain my appearance, my absence up to this point and the need to clear my head of doubts led me to the very door of her room.

They were slightly opened, and there was no sound coming out of the room. Assuming she was asleep, I quietly put my hand on the wood and pushed it forward to make sure.

"Georgia."

But my assumptions were wrong. Grandma was sitting in a chair with one leg over the other and a newspaper in her hands. She looked up from the paper as soon as I opened the door. Her reaction was similar to Kade's. An observation, a flash of regret and no greater surprise. She knew.

But the shadow of care was alien to me. Or I've never been able to see it. Until now.

"You're alright?" she asked in a calm voice, although I felt, she did not mean my wounds.

In all sincerity, I shrugged. The choice of words, not the first of the day, caused the tightness in the chest to return. So far, my mind has been filled with all and nothing. I didn't know where I was, and  w h o  I  actually was. Like water without a vessel. Which is why I wanted to change the subject.

I chose the one that tormented me the most.

"Why did you let Kade in?"

I suspected that he went to our family home first, and then to my grandmother. After all, he knew both addresses well from the not-so-distant past. But my grandmother's overwhelming absence in recent months, and her letting Kade into her home, had been confusing to me.

When she heard the question, she closed the well-known fashion magazine and put it on the table to her right. Then she joined her hands together to rest them on her knee. She looked me in the eye and suddenly changed the conversation.

"Do you know why I moved out?" Knowing that I never found out, she continued. "I didn't agree with the way your mother raised you and the way your father let her. At some point, my opinion ceased to matter to Jeanine. She wouldn't listen to me, and I couldn't bear to see what you'd become."

I wasn't sure if I heard it right. The vision in my head changed drastically, and the reasons that had come first were suddenly pushed aside by the truth. Grandmother cared about my fate. At least back then. It was because of me that the relationship between her and her mother was so cold.

The past turned out to have a larger field of exposure with every perspective.

"Then there was the hand incident, your friends stopped showing up, plus that fight, and you eventually left the city. I didn't need to know the whole story to know that Kade and the others were no longer your friends."

The tightness in my throat forced me to look away. I ended up looking at the magazine.

"Jeanine called me today, which she hasn't done in months, and she told me about last night. A moment later, Kade stands at my door, asks for one word with you, and promises never to bother us again."

As if on cue, before my eyes appeared still fresh image of the boy who with apologies left the threshold of this house. The words were bigger, included more, and meant more. With the new information, the whole situation took on nostalgic colors. I could have sworn that the weather outside had unexpectedly darkened the room.

"In our family, we prefer to face each other once and for all, so I figured you would, too. That's why I let him wait for you." Grandma finished her side of a story, speaking her last words in a voice calmer than ever.

There was a silence between us, a new shadow of peace.

The weight on my chest has noticeably decreased. I took a deep breath, looked into my grandmother's eyes, and with as much sincerity as I could muster in a moment, I said:

"Thank you."

And then something completely unknown to me appeared on her face: the shadow of a smile. Lazily raised corner of the mouth. It looked like amusement.

"It's good to know you got something from your father, too."

The room in the light of the gray day distanced my thoughts from recent events. The feeling that I arrived to my hometown months ago was impossible to drown out by anything else. The deadness of the room contrasted with the storm of last night and the returning waves of physical pain.

The phone thrown on the bed first caught my attention. I passed by the glasses on the dresser, the chaos of cosmetics and clothes, to reach my destination and dig out the disabled device from the purple sheets. I grabbed them in my bare hands, and then I felt a real chill.

Suddenly the fear took over. I haven't felt it so keenly since... breaking the glass in my hands. I saw the phone vibrate, ironically mimicking the movement of my body. I turned my mouth into a thin line, waited for a few seconds, and finally I turned on the phone. The passing time seemed like an eternity.

And when the screen finally lit up, I held my breath for a moment.

Missed calls. So many missed calls.

I frowned and, hesitantly, I began to scroll with my finger. The new information looped my stomach into an ever-larger knot. My eyes were absorbing every pixel. Unknown, but not unfamiliar number. Two completely unknown numbers. A few calls from Britt.

No response from Kendrick.

I closed my eyes, feeling the tears in Britt's eyes, Valentia's simmering anger, and Kendrick's actions that I didn't understand, and above all, the actions that I didn't deserve.

He should have left me like Valentia did. Like any person who's been lied to would.

Under the influence of suffocating feelings, I typed out the message.

But I didn't send it. The finger was hovering over the corresponding button.

I had so many decisions to make. Permanent. Irreversible. Final. The scripts were flashing before my eyes. Everything turned upside down. Nothing worked, new lands were created, which demolished the familiar and safe ones. The water fell into my mouth and right into my lungs.

Medicine or poison.

I had so many decisions to make.

And only one of them seemed right.