"Do you trust me, Rio?"

  It should have been a simple question.

  Four words, pinly arranged, the kind that arrive with their answer already waiting. The kind you don't have to think about.

  But I thought about it.

  Something stirred beneath the surface of me — quiet, unnamed, rising from a pce that existed below logic and below reason. Not doubt exactly. Something older than doubt. The kind of unease that appears when a question means more than it sounds like it means.

  I looked at her.

  She was watching me with an expression she was trying very hard to keep still. The effort showed around the edges — in the way her fingers had tightened on her bento, in the way her shoulders had drawn slightly inward, in the way she was holding herself like someone bracing for impact without wanting to show they were bracing.

  She was afraid of what I might say.

  The realization nded softly.

  "Of course I trust you," I said. "You're my best friend, Mia."

  Something passed through her eyes. Small and swift and private, gone before I could name it properly. But whatever it was, it did something to her — I watched it happen, the quiet release, the way her shoulders dropped a fraction, the way the air around her seemed to shift, like a held breath finally let go.

  "Can I ask you for something then?"

  We were already on the roof by now. The door had swung shut behind us, sealing away the sounds of the corridor below, and for a moment there was only the open sky and the wind moving slowly between buildings. The afternoon sun fell across her face at an angle — catching the gze in her eyes, sharpening her features, painting her in the particur gold that only exists in the hour before things start to cool.

  She wasn't looking at me anymore.

  Her gaze had dropped to the concrete at her feet. Her right foot moved slowly across the ground, tracing an absent, shapeless path — the habit of someone whose hands don't know what to do while the rest of them is working up to something.

  I waited.

  The city breathed around us. Somewhere below, a bell rang in a distant cssroom. The wind came through again, easy and unhurried.

  "Okay," I said. "What do you want?"

  The foot kept moving. Her fingers flexed once against her bento. I could see it happening — the inner negotiation, the back and forth of it, the moment where she almost said something and then pulled it back and started again from the beginning.

  Then she looked up.

  And said it louder than I expected.

  "Do you want to visit my house this weekend?"

  The words arrived with a force that caught me completely off guard — loud, sudden, delivered with the energy of someone who had decided the only way through was straight through. She blinked immediately after, as if surprised by herself. The wind moved through her hair.

  I stood there for a moment, just letting it settle.

  Then I thought about it. Really thought.

  For me, the idea was simple. A friend's house. A weekend afternoon. The kind of thing that should require no more consideration than what to have for lunch.

  But I did not live a simple life in that sense.

  The cases had been rising — men assaulted, followed, cornered in pces they thought were safe. The numbers climbed steadily, and with them, the walls around my own life had grown taller and closer. No staying out past four. Sia accompanying me everywhere that fell outside the known and approved. The alert button sitting in my pocket like a permanent reminder of what the world thought of my ability to exist in it unsupervised.

  And my sister. I could already picture her face when I brought this home.

  I could already hear the chaos that would follow.

  Mia noticed. She always noticed.

  "Hey." Her voice softened. "If you're not comfortable, it's okay. I understand."

  No you don't.

  The words formed clearly, honestly, and I kept them exactly where they were — behind my teeth, unspoken, where they couldn't hurt her. Because she meant well. Because her enthusiasm was already fading at the edges, dimming the way a light dims when someone moves away from it, and I couldn't stand to watch it go out completely.

  I thought for a long time.

  I turned it over slowly, the way you turn something fragile — looking for the angle, the opening, the argument that could satisfy everyone and cost nothing. I reached the end of it, considered what I found there, and made a decision.

  She was Mia. Four months of steadiness. Four months of showing up exactly as she had promised to show up, without conditions, without agenda.

  And I was not, for all the world's concern, completely without judgment of my own. I knew about her her feeling. And I knew deep inside, a part of me also wanted to feel the warmth.

  "I'll come," I said.

  The words came out with more certainty than I expected from myself.

  She looked up sharply.

  "I trust you, Mia." I held her gaze. "I know what the world looks like right now. I know what being careful means and why it matters. But you—" I paused, reaching for the right words, feeling them form slowly. "You are the person I trust most outside of my family. That's not something I say easily. That's not something I say to everyone."

  I reached forward and took her hands.

  I pressed them against my chest, over my heart, without entirely thinking it through — the gesture arriving before the reasoning did, the way certain truths arrive before you're ready to expin them.

  "You are precious to me," I said quietly. "I need you to know that."

  She didn't respond.

  I looked at her properly and found her frozen.

  Not startled — frozen. Her pupils had gone still, fixed on some point just past my face, as if her mind had stepped away from her body for a moment and left it standing there alone. Her lips were slightly parted. The bento had gone completely forgotten.

  "Ri…" Her voice arrived in pieces. "…o."

  Trembling. Barely held together. The sound of someone trying to speak through something that was too rge to speak through.

  Her hands, still pressed against my chest, had started shaking. I could feel it — the tremor moving from her fingers into my ribs, into something deeper, nding in a pce I hadn't expected it to reach.

  Then I understood what I was doing.

  I stepped back gently, releasing her hands, letting them fall back to her sides.

  "Sorry," I said. "I got carried away. I didn't think—"

  She was still exhaling. Short, uneven breaths, like someone surfacing from water. Her skin had gone deeply red from the base of her throat upward. The wind carried something warm from where she stood — something faint and sweet that hadn't been there a moment ago.

  "You—" She pressed her hand to her cheek. "You need to be careful. Pressing your hands to your chest like that — that's extremely improper, you can't just—" She stopped. Restarted. "Do you do that with other girls too?"

  I frowned.

  "No," I said. The word came out quieter than I intended, but steadier. "I did it because it was you."

  I knew where this was going. I felt it approaching, the way you feel weather approaching — in the air, before you can see it.

  "You're the person I feel safe with," I said. "That's all it was. That's everything it was."

  The words surprised me as they left. They felt like something that had been sitting in a deep pocket for a while, waiting to be found — not manufactured, not performed. Just true, in the pin and simple way that the most honest things tend to be.

  Mia's expression was doing something I couldn't fully interpret.

  I didn't have time to try.

  She moved.

  The hug arrived without warning — sudden and total, her arms locking around me with a strength that had no business belonging to someone her size. Her face pressed into my shoulder. Her whole body was trembling, fine and continuous, like a string held too tightly that has finally been plucked.

  I could hear her heartbeat.

  Not metaphorically. Literally — loud and fast against my chest, drumming through the thin fabric between us like it was trying to say something her voice couldn't manage.

  It was, genuinely, a lot.

  The pressure built steadily. My ribs registered a formal compint. My lungs began negotiations for additional space. I waited a reasonable amount of time — long enough to be kind, short enough to survive — and then tapped her shoulder twice.

  She startled as if pulling herself out of some dream.

  Released me as if she had only just realized what her arms had been doing — fast, completely, stepping back with the energy of someone caught doing something that now required immediate distance. Her eyes were wide. Her face was a color I didn't have a name for.

  And then she was gone.

  Not gradually. Not with a goodbye or a backward gnce. One moment she was there, the next the roof was empty and the door was still swinging on its hinges, the sound of her footsteps already swallowed by the stairwell below.

  I stood there in the space she had left behind.

  The wind came through again, slow and unhurried, as if nothing had happened.

  I exhaled.

  Then I looked out over the city — the rooftops and the pale sky and the ordinary afternoon continuing on without any awareness of what had just occurred up here — and felt something settle in my chest that I couldn't quite name.

  Is something about to happen?

  The thought arrived quietly, without urgency.

  I had a feeling I already knew the answer.

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  AnnouncementNext chapter will have Mia's POV. I will be uploading that part tonight. I hope you liked this chapter