Kenji found me in the library two days later, which should have told me something before he even opened his mouth — Kenji never went to the library unless he was tracking someone down. "Can we talk?" he said, sliding into the seat across from me, and something in his tone had already changed, gone careful in a way that made my stomach drop before he'd said anything real. "Sure." "Look, man, I say this as your friend." He rubbed the back of his neck, not quite meeting my eyes. "The Elara thing. You gotta let it go." "What thing." "You know what thing." He finally looked at me, and there was something almost pitying in it, which was worse than anger would have been. "The interrogating me about middle school. The weird questions. Riku said you basically accused him of lying about photos. People are starting to think it's—" he hesitated, choosing the word carefully, "—kind of intense. For a guy asking this much about his own cousin." "I'm not accusing anyone of lying. I'm asking why nobody's story matches." "Maybe because there's nothing to match, Haru. Maybe you're just—" He stopped himself, but I watched the rest of the sentence sit behind his teeth anyway, and I finished it for him, quietly, in my own head. *Maybe you're just obsessed with her.* "Say it," I said. "I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying people talk. And it's starting to sound less like you're confused and more like you've got something weird going on about your own cousin, man, and that's not—" He shook his head, standing up before I could answer, gathering his bag like the conversation had already cost him more than he wanted to spend. "Just drop it. For your own sake." He left before I could tell him that was the exact opposite of comforting. At home, it wasn't loud. It was quieter than that, and quieter is worse — my aunt answering my questions in shorter and shorter sentences, my uncle developing a sudden habit of remembering somewhere else he needed to be whenever I lingered too long in a room with him. Dinner conversation orbited entirely around Elara now — her adjustment, her plans for the semester, a small joke my uncle made that only she and my aunt seemed to fully understand, laughing at some shared reference I had no access to and wasn't invited to ask about. I caught my aunt looking at me once across the table, and for a second her expression wasn't warmth, it was something closer to wariness, the look you give a stove you're not sure is still hot. I stopped asking questions out loud after that. I started writing them down instead, in a notebook I kept under my mattress, dated entries like evidence I was building a case for a jury that would never convene — *Tuesday: Kenji says photos "must be a mixup." Wednesday: Auntie flinched when I said "before Elara came." Thursday: can't remember if the flinch was real or if I'm inventing it now too.* That last line frightened me more than anything Elara had done. I read it back three times, trying to locate the memory underneath it, and found the same clean rectangle of dust I kept finding everywhere lately — a shape where something should be, and wasn't, and I could no longer tell if the absence belonged to the world or to me. Some nights I let myself imagine simply stopping. Not believing the story, exactly, but ceasing to fight it — closing the notebook, deleting the photos, letting my mother's foggy voice on the phone become the truth instead of a symptom. It would be so much lighter, I thought, lying awake at two in the morning with my thoughts moving in slow, exhausted circles. Everyone else had already put the weight down. I was the only one still carrying it, and carrying it alone was starting to feel less like integrity and more like a private, pointless punishment. I was still turning that thought over, half-asleep, when my door opened without a knock. Elara stood in the doorway in one of my uncle's old dress shirts, unbuttoned enough that it did nothing to disguise the fact that she wore almost nothing underneath it — the hem falling just past the curve of her hips, her legs bare in the dim spill of hallway light behind her. She looked, for a moment, like something soft and harmless, a girl checking on a cousin who couldn't sleep. "I heard you," she said, stepping in and closing the door most of the way, leaving a thin blade of light along the frame. "You've been awake a long time." "I'm fine." "You're not." She said it gently, without accusation, crossing the room with the unhurried certainty she brought to everything. "You've seemed sad. I wanted to make you feel better." "Elara, I don't think—" "You don't have to think," she said, and sat on the edge of my bed, close enough that the warmth of her skin reached me before she'd even touched me, close enough that I could see the shirt had slipped another inch off one shoulder. "Isn't that what family is for? Comfort?" My pulse was already betraying me, loud enough in my own ears to drown out the part of my brain still screaming that this was wrong, that comfort wasn't supposed to look like this, that the girl sitting on my bed at two in the morning wearing almost nothing wasn't performing tenderness so much as auditioning it, watching my face for the exact reaction that would tell her she'd gotten the shape right. "You don't have to do this," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to, caught somewhere between warning and plea, aimed as much at myself as at her. "Do what?" She reached out, slow, and brushed a strand of hair back from my forehead, the gesture so tender and so wrong at once that I felt something in my chest twist violently in two directions. "I just want you to feel less alone." I didn't move away. That was the part I would hate myself for later, turning it over in the dark long after this moment had passed — not that she'd come in at all, but that some starved, exhausted piece of me, worn down by a week of being disbelieved and distrusted and quietly pushed to the edges of my own home, hadn't wanted her to leave. The hallway light behind her flickered once, faint and forgettable, the kind of thing you'd never notice if you weren't already looking for reasons not to trust what was in front of you. I noticed it anyway. And still, God help me, I didn't ask her to go.

Book 1, Chapter 5: The Weight of Being Wrong