Page 103 of Nowhere to Hide
“I know.” He nods, and then he’s gone.
I dig my phone out. No missed calls. No texts.
I start walking toward Sterling House.
Sterling House is quiet when I knock on Sloane’s door.
Eventually, the door opens, but it’s not Sloane. In the gap, Ivy stands in a T-shirt and shorts, hair loose, face bare, and whatever she sees on my face does not soften hers. She steps into the hallway and pulls the door shut behind her.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you right now, Rowan,” she says.
“I know.” I sigh and run a hand through my hair.
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I need to fix this…”
Ivy watches me, and her expression shifts — not sympathy, exactly, more like recognition. She’s seen what Sloane looks like this morning, and she’s seeing what I look like now, and she’s weighing whether overriding Sloane’s wishes will hinder or help both of us.
“Wait,” she says.
She leans back through the door. I hear murmuring, then a one-word answer from Sloane I can’t make out, and then Ivycomes back. She gives me a look that carries about six different warnings, mutters something about coffee, and then leaves.
The door opens about eight inches — enough to show me Sloane in an oversized cardigan, her hair up in a knot that’s half fallen down. She looks at me the way you look at something you knew was coming but hoped would take longer to arrive.
She’s been crying, hard enough that it’s still written on her face: the puffiness under her eyes, the chapped edges of her mouth. Behind her, a half-empty glass of water sits on the desk next to a bottle of Advil with the cap off.
Her eyes move over my face and the guarded line of her mouth loosens, just barely, and I watch her catch it and then put it away.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
“Can I come in?”
She doesn’t step back. Her hand stays on the edge of the door, and it doesn’t move — the eight inches between us holding. She’s not letting me in, and she folds her free arm across herself like she’s bracing the gap.
“You weren’t answering,” I say.
“I know.” Her voice is quiet, careful.
“Why?”
She looks at the floor. “I didn’t want to drag you into this, Rowan.”
The sentence is so small and so wrong that it takes me a second to hear what’s inside it — she already knew what I’d do if I found out about Mason’s threat, and she was trying to stop the machine before it started. It turns out she was right, and I started it anyway.
But I’m too deep in the machinery of solving the problem, and what I hear instead is an opening. So I take it, charging ahead.
“I was at Coach Franklin’s office early this morning,” I say. “I laid all of it out — the post, Mason, and what he admitted to me.”
“Yeah,” she says, with a sigh.
“Franklin’s referring him to student conduct,” I say. “Mason’s suspended from the team, pending investigation.”
She doesn’t say anything, so I keep going.
“I briefed the guys after. They’re going to do what they can to squash the gossip. So that should be it unless?—”
