Chapter 1: Chapter 1
The steering wheel was warm under Ryli’s palms, baked by a late afternoon sun that felt like it was personally offended by autumn. She drummed her fingers, waiting for Laney to gather her rainbow explosion of a backpack from the footwell.
“Come on, Lanes. I’ve got things to do.”
“You have video games to play,” Laney corrected, not looking up as she meticulously checked each zippered compartment. “There’s a difference.”
Ryli didn’t argue. The kid was eleven and already saw right through everyone, especially her. It was exhausting. She gazed out at the Miller house, a tidy, beige split-level that screamed normalcy. Two plastic Adirondack chairs sat empty on the lawn. A swing-set, rusting slightly at the joints, stood sentinel in the side yard. It was all so aggressively pleasant it made Ryli’s teeth ache.
Her eyes skipped over it, landing on the figure in the third chair, the one tucked under the oak tree.
A girl. Maybe her age, maybe a little older. She was curled into a worn wooden chair, a thick paperback splayed open in her lap. Wired headphones trailed from her ears, the cord snaking into the pocket of a soft-looking hoodie. The sun, filtering through the oak leaves, dappled her in shifting coins of light and shadow.
Ryli just stared.
It wasn’t a judgment. It wasn’t even a conscious thought. It was a system overload. Her brain, usually a whirring catalog of critiques and exit strategies, just… stopped. The girl’s face was all sharp, interesting lines—a defined jaw, a straight nose, eyebrows that were full and dark. She was chewing on her lower lip, utterly absorbed, one foot tapping a faint rhythm only she could hear against the leg of the chair.
Pretty.
The word arrived in Ryli’s mind like a foreign object. It felt incorrect. She didn’t find people ‘pretty’. She found them annoying, or loud, or predictable. She found their faces a collection of features she could usually pick apart. Too close together, smile too wide, eyes too vacant. Her own face, in the mirror each morning, was a project of things to tolerate. The freckles she couldn’t bleach away, the stubborn curve of her mouth that never seemed to sit right in a smile, the permanent skeptical arch of her own eyebrows.
Pretty was a concept for other people. A social agreement she’d never ratified.
So this static in her head, this complete short-circuit at the sight of a stranger reading under a tree, made no sense. It was uncomfortable. It felt like a flaw in her own wiring.
Laney finally hauled her backpack onto her shoulders with a grunt. “Okay, I’m good. Thanks for the ride, Ry.”
“Yeah.” Ryli’s voice came out flat. Her eyes didn’t move from the window.
Laney followed her gaze. “Oh, that’s just Cadence. She’s weird. Don’t stare, it’s rude.”
The name did nothing. Cadence. It was just a sound.
“Who?” Ryli asked, finally tearing her eyes away to look at Laney.
“My sister. Duh.” Laney shoved the car door open, the interior light blinking on. “The older one. She’s home from college, I guess.”
Sister.
The word rattled around in the empty space where Ryli’s understanding was supposed to be. This person, Cadence, belonged here. She was part of the beige, pleasant house and the rusting swing-set. She was Laney’s sister. A fact. Simple. Yet Ryli’s mind couldn’t connect the two data points—the vibrant, confusing stillness of the girl under the tree, and the mundane reality of being Laney Miller’s sibling.
It felt like being shown a secret formula and then told it was just ketchup.
“Huh,” was all Ryli could manage.
Leyna was already halfway up the walk, yelling a goodbye over her shoulder. Ryli’s hand moved automatically, shifting the car into drive. But her foot stayed on the brake.
She looked back.
Cadence had turned a page. She hadn’t noticed the car, or Laney’s arrival, or Ryli’s stare. She was in a world made of paper and ink and whatever was flowing through those headphones. A slight breeze lifted a piece of hair that had escaped her messy bun, and she tucked it behind her ear with an absent, graceful motion.
Ryli’s own head felt crowded and loud. Her thoughts were a jumble of disconnected, critical fragments. The unpaid bill on her desk at home. The vague, sourceless anxiety that was her default setting. The certain knowledge that she’d said the wrong thing to someone recently, she just couldn’t remember who.
And now this. This strange, quiet earthquake under an oak tree.
It was too many things. Too many things were wrong, inside her and outside her, and this sudden, pointless fixation on a stranger’s profile was just the newest one. She didn’t understand it, and she hated not understanding.
She took her foot off the brake and let the car roll forward.
In the rearview mirror, the figure under the tree grew smaller, but no less distinct. A fixed point in the receding landscape of normal houses and green lawns.
Ryli drove the rest of the way home in a dense, prickling silence, the image of the girl—Cadence—burned into the back of her eyes like she’d stared too long at the sun.
Ryli drove the rest of the way home in a dense, prickling silence, the image of the girl—Cadence—burned into the back of her eyes like she’d stared too long at the sun.
Sleep that night was a fractured thing. She kept seeing the dappled light on a sharp jawline, the precise tap of a foot against wood. It was infuriating. Her brain was supposed to analyze threats and annoyances, not get snagged on a random person reading a book. By morning, the irritation had hardened into a kind of grim defiance. It was a glitch. She would overwrite it.
“You’re driving,” Ryli announced, tossing her car keys at her younger sister Kayla, who fumbled and caught them against her chest.
Kayla, sixteen and perpetually wide-eyed, blinked. “Me? But it’s your car.”
“And my gas. So you’re the chauffeur. We’re picking up Laney.” Ryli slid into the passenger seat, pulling her knees up. She needed to be a passenger today. To look without the pretense of driving.
Kayla shrugged, ever-amiable, and started the car. The radio blared to life, some pop song saturated with auto-tune. Ryli stared out the window as the familiar streets slid by, the neat houses blurring into a monochrome streak. Her mind was curiously blank, a held breath.
They pulled up to the Miller house. The two plastic chairs were still there. The swing-set. The oak tree.
The chair underneath it was empty.
A sharp, illogical disappointment cut through her. Stupid. What did you expect?
Then the front door opened, and Laney bounced out, her conversation trailing behind her. And there she was.
Cadence.
She was walking with Laney, nodding at something her sister was saying. She wore different clothes—loose, faded jeans and a simple grey t-shirt, the hoodie probably abandoned inside. The headphones were gone. In the clear morning light, her features were even more distinct. She looked up as Kayla’s car idled at the curb.
Their eyes met for the second time.
A jolt, like faulty wiring. Ryli didn’t look away. She couldn’t have, even if she wanted to. She felt pinned, assessed by that dark, calm gaze. It lasted only a second before Cadence’s attention shifted to the driver’s side, where Kayla was waving.
Laney yanked the back door open and threw her bag in. “Hey! Bye, Cady!”
Cadence had stopped a few feet from the car. She tucked her hands into her pockets. “Where are you off to?” Her voice was lower than Ryli had imagined, slightly rough, like she wasn’t used to using it first thing.
“Hanging with Kayla! And her sister.” Laney jerked a thumb toward the passenger seat.
Cadence’s eyes flicked back to Ryli. A faint, questioning line appeared between her brows. “Who’s that?”
Laney climbed in, slamming the door. She rolled down the window, yelling the answer like it was public announcement. “That’s Ryli! Kayla’s sister. She’s eighteen. And she’s, like, five-seven. And totally crazy.”
Kayla giggled from the driver’s seat. “Laney!”
“What? It’s true!” Laney leaned out the window, her voice dropping into a stage whisper meant to carry. “She drinks and does drugs and parties all the time. Mom says she’s a bad influence.”
The words hung in the Saturday morning air, brutal and simple. A biography in a blunt, childish hand.
Ryli watched Cadence’s face. She saw the subtle shift—the slight widening of the eyes, not in surprise, but in a recalibration. The quiet curiosity that had been there a moment ago cooled, sealed over by this new, damning information. Cadence’s gaze on Ryli turned flat. Distant. A look of understanding, and dismissal.
It was the look Ryli was used to. It was the look she often provoked. It should have felt familiar. It should have felt like nothing.
Instead, it felt like a door clicking shut in a hallway she hadn’t even known she was walking down.
Cadence gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. “Right,” she said, more to herself than to anyone in the car. She took a small step back from the curb. “Have fun, Laney.”
“Bye!” Laney chirped, rolling up the window. “Okay, go!”
Kayla put the car in drive, offering an apologetic wince to her sister. Ryli didn’t acknowledge it. She kept her eyes fixed on the side-view mirror.
Cadence stood on the sidewalk, hands still in her pockets, watching them pull away. The morning sun lit her from the side, turning her into a crisp-cut silhouette against the beige house. She didn’t wave.
As the car turned the corner, Ryli finally let out the breath she’d been holding. Her chest was tight. A hot, familiar shame—tinged with a newer, sharper regret—curled in her stomach. Laney’s description wasn’t wrong. It was just the headline, devoid of context or cause. The CliffsNotes version of her damage.
And Cadence had believed it. Of course she had. Why wouldn’t she?
The static was back in Ryli’s head, louder now, a roar of white noise between her ears. She found the girl attractive. That was the maddening, undeniable core of it. The sharp features, the quiet intensity, the way she seemed to occupy space like it was hers to claim. It was a purely physical pull, a hum in the blood she hadn’t felt before.
But obviously, she wasn’t a good person.
As Laney told her.
The car filled with Kayla and Laney’s easy chatter, a world away. Ryli closed her eyes, but all she could see was that final, flat look of dismissal on a face she already, against all reason, wanted to see again.