Page 87 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
For a second I think he might test it anyway. Might say her name again. Might try to hold onto the moral ground he came in here standing on. But he must see something in my face thattalks him out of it, because he gives a small nod instead. Not agreement. Not surrender. Just the acknowledgment of a line.
Then he steps backward toward the door.
His hand finds the handle behind him without his eyes ever leaving mine. When the door opens, hallway noise spills briefly into the room, bright, careless, and disgustingly normal. He pauses there for one final second, jaw tight, as if he’s still debating whether there’s something worth saying over his shoulder.
There isn’t.
He leaves.
The door swings shut again, and I’m alone with the shattered mirror, the sting in my hand, and the ugly certainty that none of this fixed a goddamn thing.
CHAPTER 16
Octavia
If you had told me two weeks ago that I’d be standing in my kitchen missing the chaos of Silas Corvin, I would have laughed in your face.
Not politely either.
I would have looked you dead in the eye and asked if you had me confused with some other girl, some girl with worse instincts than mine, some girl stupid enough to feel the absence of a boy who walked into her life like a storm and touched every bruise he could find. But that was before I learned that silence can be crueler than conflict. Before I learned that distance, when it’s deliberate enough, can feel like its own kind of violence.
Now I live with a ghost.
He’s still in the house. Technically. His shoes still end up by the door sometimes. His boxing wraps dry over the laundry room sink. His bedroom door still shuts every night. But that’s all he feels like lately. A presence reduced to evidence. A shadow that moves around the edges of my life without ever fully stepping into it.
It started gradually enough that I almost convinced myself I imagined it.
One skipped dinner turned into three. Then he stopped coming home before dark. Then the mornings changed too. No more silent drives to campus with that unbearable tension filling the car. No more clipped questions over protein bars and coffee. He started taking cabs to Spokehaven instead, slipping out before I could catch him or coming back after everyone had already settled in for the night. When he did show up on campus, it was inconsistent enough to make me stop looking for him, which somehow only made me look harder.
And then there was the gym.
The boxing gym has swallowed whatever parts of him this house couldn’t. He spends hours there, longer than anyone reasonably should, coming home with split knuckles, sweat-soaked shirts, and eyes that look even farther away than before. Mom says it’s good for him. Dad says structure helps. Neither of them notices that he barely speaks anymore, or maybe they notice and call it progress because adults love pretending distance is the same thing as healing.
The worst part is that I have no idea why.
That is what keeps needling at me. Not just the distance itself, but the fact that it arrived without explanation and settled in so completely that now I can’t even tell if I imagined the warmth that came before it. One minute there was a boy in a room with his mouth on my scars, telling me morning only makes people cowardly enough to deny what happened. The next, there was this version of him. Cold and unreachable.
Creative Arts disappeared from his schedule after the absences piled up.
Dad told me not to worry about it. Told me the transition was hard and some students need time. Told me Silas had been through a lot and Spokehaven might take some getting used to. He said it with that same careful patience parents use when they think they’re handling something fragile correctly.
He has no idea.
No idea that Silas and I shared stolen moments that never should have happened and somehow still felt inevitable. No idea how quickly those moments were stripped back from me, leaving behind only fragments, heat, and questions that don’t stop multiplying no matter how hard I try to starve them. No idea that the silence in this house doesn’t feel like adjustment.
It feels personal.
And maybe that’s the cruelest part of all.
Because if he had snapped, if he had gotten mean again, if he had said something cutting enough to make me hate him properly, at least I would know where I stood. At least I could build anger around the wound and call it armor.
Instead, I’m left with uncertainty.
With the memory of his body pressed against mine in the dark.
With the bruises that faded before I was ready to let them.
“Earth to Octavia.”
