Chapter 3: The Grocery Lot Confrontation
The automatic doors of Fresh Mart slid open with a tired sigh, releasing Cadence back into the evening. The air had cooled, carrying the damp, earthy scent of impending rain. In the orange-tinted dusk, Ryli’s Charger looked less like a predator and more like a resting beast, its black paint drinking the light from the flickering streetlamp above.
Ryli hadn’t moved from her lean against the driver’s side door. She straightened as Cadence approached, the two reusable grocery bags looking comically domestic in her hands.
“Find everything you needed?” Ryli asked. Her voice was softer outside the phone, more textured.
“Pasta, sauce, the existential dread of meal planning. The usual.” Cadence shifted the bags, the plastic handles digging into her fingers.
“Here.” Ryli was there in two swift strides, her hands closing over the bags before Cadence could protest. Their fingers brushed, a brief, electric contact on the hard ridge of a handle. Cadence felt the jolt straight up her arm, a live wire of sensation. Ryli seemed to feel it too; she went very still for a fraction of a second, her gaze snapping to Cadence’s before she carefully took the full weight of the groceries.
“Thanks,” Cadence murmured, her hand feeling suddenly empty, cold.
Ryli didn’t move back to the car. She stood holding the bags, looking at Cadence as if she were another, more complex problem to solve. The neon ‘Open’ sign buzzed and sputtered, washing her face in a fitful red glow. “Was this it?” she asked. The question wasn’t casual.
“Was what it?”
“The interaction. You get your groceries. I carry them. We say goodnight.” Ryli’s tone was flat, but her eyes were anything but. They were pleading, almost. Terrified of the answer.
Cadence’s heart was a frantic thing against her ribs. Hunt’s voice was a faint, sensible whisper in the back of her mind, drowned out by the roaring present tense of Ryli Bradford standing in a pool of bad light, holding her pasta sauce. “What do you want it to be?”
A truck rattled past on the main road, its passage a wave of sound and displaced air. When it faded, the quiet felt deeper.
“I want you to get in the car,” Ryli said, the words leaving her like a challenge thrown down. “Not because I’m stealing you. Not because it’s a line. I just want to drive. With you. And I want to talk without a screen between us. That’s all.”
It wasn’t all. Cadence could feel the ‘more’ humming in the space between them, thick as the pre-storm humidity. But the ‘more’ was also the point. She was tired of the warnings, the second-hand stories. She needed her own evidence.
“Okay,” she said.
The word seemed to shock them both. Ryli blinked, then turned without another word, placing the groceries carefully in the Charger’s back seat. She opened the passenger door, a gesture that felt oddly formal.
Cadence slid in. The interior was shockingly clean, smelling of leather and a faint, crisp citrus. No fast-food wrappers, no empty cans. Just a pair of aviator sunglasses in the dash cubby and a university parking pass dangling from the mirror. This meticulous order was another quiet surprise.
The door thudded shut, sealing them in a cocoon of soft dashboard light and profound silence. Ryli got in, the car dipping slightly with her weight. She didn’t start the engine immediately. Her hands rested on the wheel, long fingers tapping once, twice.
“Seatbelt,” she said, her voice tight.
Cadence pulled the strap across her chest, the click deafening.
Then Ryli turned the key. The engine woke with a low, guttural rumble that vibrated through the seats, up through Cadence’s bones. It was a powerful, contained sound. Ryli didn’t peel out. She backed up with careful precision, then guided the car onto the access road with a smoothness that spoke of intimate familiarity.
They drove. Not toward the rowdy fraternity houses or the blaring strip of downtown bars, but upward, winding through residential streets that grew steeper and more wooded. The mansions gave way to wooded lots, then to the scrubby pines that lined the road to the ridge. The Charger’s headlights cut through the deepening blue of night.
“You drive… calmly,” Cadence observed, breaking the quiet.
A short, surprised laugh escaped Ryli. “You were expecting me to drag race up a mountain?”
“I didn’t know what to expect.”
Ryli glanced at her, then back at the serpentine road. “It’s just a car. It goes where I tell it to.” She paused. “Most of the time.”
They lapsed back into silence, but it was changing, becoming something they inhabited together rather than a wall between them. The city lights began to spread out below them, a glittering grid of gold and white smudged by the haze of the valley.
Ryli pulled into a gravel overlook, empty save for a single battered pickup truck that soon left. She killed the engine. The sudden absence of the rumble was a shock. Now there was only the whisper of the pines, the distant hum of the city, and the sound of their own breathing.
“This is it,” Ryli said, unnecessarily.
They got out. The air was cooler up here, sharp with pine resin. Cadence walked to the low stone wall that edged the lookout, resting her hands on the sun-warmed granite. Ryli came to stand beside her, not too close, mirroring her posture.
For a while, they just looked. The sky was a deep velvet, the first bold stars puncturing the expanse above the orange glow of the urban horizon.
“It’s quieter up here, too,” Cadence said softly.
Ryli nodded, her profile sharp against the skyline. “That’s why I come. Lets you see the whole messy machine without having to hear the noise.”
“Is that how you see it? A machine?”
“Isn’t it?” Ryli shifted, pulling a pack of gum from her hoodie pocket. She offered a piece to Cadence, who took it. The simple mint taste was a shock on her tongue. “Everything down there is a transaction. Parties for social capital. Classes for a degree. Relationships for…” She trailed off, peeling the foil from her own piece. “For something to do on a Tuesday.”
“That’s a cynical map.”
“It’s an accurate one.” Ryli chewed slowly, her jaw working. “You don’t play the game. That’s what I couldn’t figure out. You’re in the middle of it all, but you’re not on the board. You have your friends, your tennis, your weirdly principled stance on frat beer. You’re just… extant.” She said the word like it was a rare and fascinating condition.
Cadence absorbed this. It was closer to the truth than she expected Ryli to get. “I just don’t like the noise.”
“I am the noise, Cadence.” The admission was blunt, devoid of pride. “I’m the loud music, the messed-up drama, the bad decision people regret in the morning. I know the stories Hunt told you. Most of them are probably true.”
The wind picked up, rustling the trees behind them. Cadence turned to face her, leaning her hip against the wall. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because when you look at me,” Ryli said, finally meeting her eyes in the semi-darkness, “I don’t want you to see the story. I want you to see me. And I don’t know how to do that without… clearing the debris.”
The raw honesty of it was disarming. This wasn’t a confession designed to elicit sympathy. It was a statement of fact, a laying down of arms. Cadence saw the wounded, dangerous edge Hunt had described, but she saw it now as a scar, not a weapon.
“The water refill,” Cadence said. “The vanilla sugar. My tennis serve. That’s not debris, Ryli. That’s… noticing. It’s quiet.”
Ryli looked away, her throat working. “It feels quiet. With you. It’s the only time it does.” She shook her head, as if angry at herself. “I don’t know what to do with that. I usually know what to do.”
A car sped by on the road below, a white streak of sound that faded into the distance. Cadence took a step closer, closing the careful distance Ryli had maintained. The gravel crunched under her sneaker.
“You’re doing it right now,” Cadence said quietly.
Ryli’s breath hitched. She looked down at Cadence, her dark eyes searching her face in the starlight. The bravado was completely gone, stripped away by the altitude and the honesty. What remained was startlingly young, uncertain. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
They stood like that for a long moment, the city breathing below them. The tension wasn’t gone; it had been refined, distilled into this clear, aching space between their bodies. Every sense felt heightened: the smell of mint and pine, the coolness of the stone at Cadence’s back, the magnetic heat radiating from Ryli.
Finally, Ryli shoved her hands back in her pockets, a retreat to safer ground. “We should get you back. Your frozen stuff will melt.”
The moment passed,但不是破碎，而是被轻轻搁置。他们回到车上，沉默回归，但这一次是舒适的。下山的路上，莱利开得更慢了。
她在卡丹丝的公寓前停下，但让引擎空转着。她没有关上灯。
“今晚的事，”卡丹丝说着，解开了安全带。“谢谢你。为了开车，也为了…… clearing the debris.”
莱利点点头，她的手指在方向盘上收紧又松开。“明天有网球训练吗？”
“下午两点。”
“我会记得带水，”莱利说，嘴角闪过一丝几乎难以察觉的笑意，那是她们之间一个私密的玩笑。
卡丹丝笑了，一种轻松、发自内心的快乐。“你当然会。”
她下了车，走到后备箱取她的杂物袋。莱利也出来了，把袋子递给她。这次她们的手指没有碰到。
“晚安，卡丹丝，”莱利说，声音低沉。
“晚安，莱利。”
卡丹丝看着她回到驾驶座，那辆黑色 Charger 缓缓驶离路边，像一个逐渐消失的影子，融入夜色之中。她提着袋子走上楼梯，感觉到夜晚的空气在她皮肤上感觉不同了——charged，充满了可能性。
她刚把钥匙插进锁孔，手机就在口袋里振动了。她心里知道是谁。
一条短信。不是 Snapchat。只是普通的短信。
Ryli: I didn’t steal anything.
然后是紧接着的一条：
Ryli: But I think you stole my ability to be cynical for about an hour. I want a refund.
卡丹丝靠在关着的门上，笑容爬上了她的脸颊。她回复道：
Cadence: No refunds. Store policy. You should have read the signs.
对方的回复几乎立即传回：
Ryli: The only sign I saw said ‘Lookout.’ I looked out. I’m screwed.
在楼下的黑暗中，在返回她自己公寓的路上，莱利·布拉德福德盯着那条信息，感觉胸口有一种陌生的、令人恐慌的紧绷感。那不是欲望，或征服，或任何她熟悉的情感图谱。那是一种渴望，纯净而尖锐。她开车经过一个又一个派对，音乐从敞开的窗户飘出，朋友们挥手叫她停下。她只是按了按喇叭，没有减速，朝着孤独的方向驶去，脑海中只有一个安静、金发的形象，就像一个在嘈杂世界中找到的默许圣像，而她正危险地、无可挽回地想要靠近。
I’m screwed.
The words glowed on Ryli’s screen, a confession she’d never have spoken aloud. She tossed the phone onto the passenger seat where it landed with a soft thud. The console clock read 11:37 PM. The night was young for her, usually. Every instinct told her to find a crowd, a drink, a distraction to dissolve this unfamiliar feeling.
She drove straight home.
Cadence unpacked the groceries, the mundane task at odds with the buzzing in her veins. She placed the jar of sauce in the cupboard, her mind replaying the gravel-underfoot sound of the overlook, the way the city lights had reflected in Ryli’s dark eyes. Her phone, face-up on the counter, buzzed again.
An image. A blurry, dark photo of Ryli’s dashboard. The parking pass, the clean console. The text underneath read: Proof of life. Returned to the scene of the crime. No hostages taken.
Cadence laughed, a bright sound in her quiet kitchen. She typed back: The pasta sauce is safe. I’m auditing the inventory now.
Ryli: I left my gum wrapper in your cup holder. Consider it a calling card.
Cadence: A biodegradable one. How thoughtful.
The banter was easy, a gentle tide pulling her further out. She saved the photo.
The next day, after a morning lecture that failed to hold her attention, Cadence found Hunt in their usual spot in the library annex, a tucked-away corner with green lamps and the smell of old bindings. He was highlight-ing a textbook, a frown of concentration on his face that melted when he saw her.
“There she is,” he said, capping his marker. “You vanished after pizza the other night. Got home okay?”
“Yeah,” Cadence said, sliding into the worn leather chair opposite him. She pulled her laptop from her bag, but didn’t open it. The saved photo felt like a physical weight in her phone. “I, uh. I saw Ryli. Last night.”
Hunt’s easy smile froze, then dissolved. He set the highlighter down precisely. “Saw her.”
“We talked. In person.” Cadence heard the defensiveness in her own voice and hated it. “It wasn’t… it wasn’t what you think.”
“What do I think, Cade?” His voice was careful, neutral. It was the tone he used when talking someone down from a bad decision. “Tell me what happened.”
So she did. She summarized the grocery store, the drive, the lookout. She stuck to facts, mostly. She left out the electric brush of hands, the raw admission of ‘I am the noise,’ the way the quiet between them had felt like a shared language. She made it sound benign. A drive. A view.
Hunt listened, his expression unreadable. When she finished, he simply said, “Show me.”
“What?”
“The messages. From after. Show me what she’s saying to you now.”
A cold spike of betrayal shot through her. This was private. The quiet, sweet space on her screen felt sacred. “Hunt, that’s—”
“It’s what friends do when they’re worried,” he interrupted, his voice low but firm. “You’re showing me the curated, in-person version. I want to see the digital one. That’s where the manipulation usually lives. Please.”
The word ‘manipulation’ stung. It clashed violently with the memory of Ryli’s unsure posture against the Charger, her plea to be seen. But Hunt’s eyes held no judgment, only a deep, familiar concern. He’d been her harbor through every stupid high school crush, every family frustration. She owed him this transparency.
With a tight feeling in her chest, she unlocked her phone, opened the message thread, and handed it to him.
She watched his face as he scrolled. His eyes moved quickly, taking in the exchange from the night before—the joking about the lookout, the gum wrapper, the easy back-and-forth. He saw the photo of the clean car interior. His jaw was set. He scrolled further back, through the week of messages: the note about the vending machine, the coffee cart, the observation about her tennis serve. His brows drew together. The playful, attentive cadence of Ryli’s words was undeniable.
He read the final messages from last night again. I didn’t steal anything. But I think you stole my ability to be cynical for about an hour. I want a refund.
No refunds. Store policy.
The only sign I saw said ‘Lookout.’ I looked out. I’m screwed.
Hunt let out a long, slow breath. He placed the phone gently on the table between them, screen down. He rubbed a hand over his face.
“Well?” Cadence asked, the word barely a whisper.
“It’s worse than I thought,” he said, his voice heavy with a dread that chilled her.
“Worse? Hunt, it’s all just… it’s nice. It’s sweet. You see that, right?”
“I see it,” he admitted, nodding. He looked at her, his eyes pained. “That’s what’s so terrifying. It’s perfect. It’s tailored. She’s not coming at you with drama or intensity. She’s disarming you. She’s showing you the one version of herself you wouldn’t automatically run from.”
“You think it’s an act?” The possibility felt like a physical blow.
“I think it’s a strategy.” He leaned forward, his hands clasped tightly. “Listen to me. The Ryli I’ve heard about, the one who ghosted Maya Fisher? She love-bombed her first. Texts all day, showed up at her classes. Made her feel like the only person in the world. It was fast, and it was overwhelming. You’d have run from that. So Ryli’s not doing that with you. She’s being patient. She’s being… considerate. She’s memorizing your coffee order, for God’s sake. It’s the same playbook, Cade. Just a slower, smarter tempo designed specifically for you.”
Cadence’s stomach roiled. The vanilla sugar, the watchful silence at her tennis match—through Hunt’s lens, they transformed from gestures of care into data points in a campaign. “You can’t know that.”
“I can’t prove it,” he corrected. “But look at the pattern. She identifies what someone needs, and she becomes that. For Maya, it was passionate, public adoration. For you? It’s quiet attention. It’s stability. It’s the antithesis of her own reputation. Don’t you see how calculated that is?”
The green lamp light felt harsh now, exposing. Cadence wanted to reject his logic, to cling to the feeling of the cool night air and Ryli’s unguarded expression. But Hunt’s words seeped in, toxic and plausible.
“Why, though?” she asked, her voice small. “If she’s all that, why bother? I’m not… I’m not a conquest. I’m boring.”
“You’re not boring,” Hunt said sharply. “You’re solid. You’re real. And for someone who lives in a world of fake, that might be the ultimate novelty. The most challenging thing to acquire.” He reached out and took her hand. His was warm, steadying. “I’m not saying she’s consciously evil. Maybe she doesn’t even fully know why she’s doing it. But the outcome is the same. People get hurt. I have never been more scared for you than I am right now, reading those… perfectly kind texts.”
Tears pricked at the corners of Cadence’s eyes, hot and frustrated. He was voicing her own deepest fear—that the connection she felt was a mirage, a performance for an audience of one. The narrative was splitting in two, and she was stranded in the fracture.
Her phone, still screen-down on the table, buzzed.
They both looked at it. The sound was obscenely loud in the tense silence.
“Don’t answer it,” Hunt said softly.
Cadence stared at the dark back of her phone. She imagined the notification lighting up the screen. Another piece of carefully crafted text. Another step in a strategy.
With a trembling hand, she flipped the phone over.
The screen showed a new message preview from Ryli.
Weather’s shit. Practice cancelled?
A simple, casual question. The kind a girlfriend would ask. A person who paid attention would know.
Cadence looked from the innocuous words to Hunt’s genuinely frightened face, and felt the two realities tear at her, each one demanding belief.
Cadence’s thumb hovered over the screen. The library’s hushed air, once comforting, now felt thick and suffocating.
“See?” Hunt whispered, the word sharp as a blade. “The check-in. It’s part of the pattern. Maintaining contact, establishing normalcy.”
“It’s a question about the weather,” Cadence breathed, her voice tight.
“It’s a thread she’s pulling.” He leaned back, running a hand through his hair. “And you’re letting her.”
The accusation hung there. Cadence looked at the message again. Practice cancelled? It was just a question. It was also a lifeline back to the person who made the noise in her head stop. She pressed the power button on the side of her phone, watching the screen go dark. She couldn’t answer. Not with Hunt’s devastated eyes on her.
“I need to think,” she said, shoving her unopened laptop back into her bag.
“Cade—”
“I need to think alone, Hunt.” She stood, the chair legs scraping loudly on the linoleum. A few students glanced over, annoyed. She didn’t care. The need for silence, for real silence, was a physical ache. She walked out, leaving him sitting there, surrounded by his highlighted books and his rightness.
She didn’t go to her apartment. She went to the tennis center. The vast indoor halls were empty, the lights off save for the gray daylight filtering through high windows. Her sneakers squeaked on the pristine courts. She dropped her bag and walked to the service line, the familiar geometry of the space calming her frantic thoughts.
She practiced her serve. Not with balls, just the motion. The toss, the coil, the uncoiling snap into empty air. Over and over. The physical ritual carved a channel through the chaos in her mind.
Meanwhile, across campus, Ryli stared at her own phone, the glow illuminating her face in the dim light of her parked car. She’d been sitting outside her economics lecture for ten minutes. The class had started. She could hear the professor’s muffled voice through the brick.
Her screen remained stubbornly blank. No reply from Cadence.
An old habit, a deep-seated reflex, flared. The sharp sting of rejection. The immediate, furious need to obliterate the feeling. Her fingers itched to text Milo, to find out where the blunt was, where the noise was. Her phone lit up with a notification. It was a group chat, a cascade of messages planning for that night.
Party at Sigma Chi. Kegs landed. Starts early.
Ryli you in? Bring the good stuff.
Yeah Rils, been ages. You ghosting us?
The familiar language, the easy chaos, called to her like a warm, toxic bath. It was a place where she was known, where she ruled. Where she wouldn’t have to feel this cold, waiting silence.
She typed a quick reply: Maybe. Hit me later.
Then she deleted it. She watched the dancing cursor. She thought of Cadence’s face in the grocery store lot, soft and questioning in the neon light. She thought of the quiet at the lookout, a quiet that didn’t feel empty. It felt full.
She exited the group chat. She turned her phone to silent. She grabbed her backpack—actually full of notebooks for once—and got out of the car. She walked into the lecture hall, slipping into a seat in the back. The professor droned on about macroeconomic indicators. Ryli opened a notebook. She didn’t write down a word. She just sat there, feeling the foreign weight of trying.
Cadence served until her shoulder burned. The rational part of her mind, the part that trusted Hunt implicitly, agreed with his analysis. The pattern was undeniable. The shift in Ryli’s behavior was extreme.
But her gut, a quieter, more stubborn organ, whispered something else. It remembered the rawness in Ryli’s voice when she said, “I am the noise.” Performances were polished. That had been a fracture.
Her phone, now powered back on, showed no new messages. The silence from Ryli felt significant. If she were playing a game, wouldn’t she follow up? Wouldn’t she double-text, apply pressure?
The contradiction was maddening.
She drove home as a cold rain began to spit against her windshield. Her apartment felt too still. She made the pasta, ate it without tasting it. The evening stretched before her, long and hollow. She missed the volley of texts. She missed the sense of being meticulously seen.
At 8 PM, her doorbell rang. Her heart stuttered. She wasn’t expecting anyone. Hunt would have texted. She peered through the peephole.
It was Auddy and Annie, holding a tub of ice cream and wearing matching, concerned smiles.
“Hunt sent out an SOS,” Auddy said, holding up the ice cream like a peace offering. “He said you were having a ‘bad brain day’ about a girl. We’re here for the debrief.”
Cadence let them in, a wave of affection tempering her irritation at Hunt’s interference. They settled on her couch, passing the tub of cookie dough between them.
“So,” Annie said, getting straight to the point. “Ryli Bradford.”
Cadence told them. The grocery store, the drive, the lookout. She showed them the message thread. She told them Hunt’s theory.
Auddy scrolled, her brow furrowed. “Okay, the pattern thing is creepy. I’ll give that to Hunt. It’s textbook love-bombing, but in slow motion.”
“But,” Annie interjected, pointing at the screen, “look at this one. ‘The cat deserved an award.’ That’s just… dorky. Who fakes being a dork?”
“A brilliant psychopath?” Auddy offered.
“Or a girl who’s actually into you and is really, really bad at being normal about it,” Annie countered. “You said she looked ‘terrified’ at the grocery store. You can’t act that.”
“You can if you’re a method actor,” Auddy said.
“For weeks? For a college fling?” Annie shook her head. “The ROI is terrible. The effort doesn’t match the crime.”
They were voicing the exact war inside her. The ice cream was gone. The rain tapped a steady rhythm against the window.
“What do I do?” Cadence asked, feeling utterly lost.
“You get more data,” Auddy said firmly. “But you do it safely. In public. In daylight. With a clear head. You test the hypothesis.”
“And if she’s for real?” Annie asked softly.
“Then Hunt owes her an apology,” Auddy said. “And you owe it to yourself to see what happens.”
The data came sooner than expected, and not from Cadence.
Two days later, Briley showed up at Cadence’s door. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but she looked more confused than devastated.
“We need to talk,” Briley said, sinking onto the couch. “It’s about Ryli. Something’s wrong with her.”
Cadence’s breath caught. “What do you mean?”
“She won’t answer my texts. Any of them. And I know she’s seen them.” Briley played with a thread on her sleeve. “And it’s not just me. Milo said she’s blown off the last three parties. He went by her place to see if she wanted to smoke, and she said she had to read for class. Class.”
The words landed with strange weight. Cadence remained silent, listening.
“She deleted her social apps, I think. Or just stopped posting. Her Snapchat score hasn’t moved in days.” Briley looked up, genuinely perplexed. “Anya from my bio lab said she saw Ryli in the library. The actual library. Headphones in, just… reading. It’s like she’s been body-snatched.”
A faint, impossible hope began to glow in Cadence’s chest. It fought against Hunt’s careful, fearful logic.
“Maybe she’s just busy,” Cadence offered weakly.
“Ryli?” Briley laughed, a hollow sound. “Busy with what? She majored in hedonism with a minor in chaos. This isn’t busy. This is a personality transplant.” She fixed Cadence with a watery stare. “Did you say something to her? After movie night? You’re the only new variable.”
The question was a direct hit. Cadence thought of their last interaction. The lookout. The quiet. Her own unresolved text message, still hanging in the digital void. “We just talked.”
Briley studied her for a long moment, and a dawning, terrible understanding crossed her face. It wasn’t anger. It was resignation. “Oh,” she said quietly. “It’s you. Of course it’s you.”
“Briley, I didn’t—”
“No, it makes sense.” She stood up, brushing nonexistent lint from her jeans. “You’re the shiny new thing. The quiet, good girl. Of course she’d get obsessed. It’s a challenge.” The old narrative, Hunt’s narrative, was the one Briley could understand. It was the only one that made her own hurt make sense. “Just be careful, Cadence. When she gets bored… you’ll be the one sitting here confused.”
After Briley left, the apartment felt charged. The evidence was mounting, but it pointed in two opposite directions. Withdrawal from her old life could be a sign of manipulation, a total immersion in a new role. Or it could be a sign of something real. A change.
Cadence picked up her phone. The last message from Ryli still glowed there: Weather’s shit. Practice cancelled?
She couldn’t live in the fracture anymore.
She typed a reply, her fingers steady.
Cadence: Practice was cancelled. My shoulder was sore anyway.
She sent it. The whoosh sounded final.
The three dots appeared immediately. They vanished. Reappeared. The cycle repeated for a full minute. A silent struggle was happening on the other end.
The reply, when it came, was not what she expected.
Ryli: I’m sorry.
Cadence blinked at the screen.
Cadence: For what?
Ryli: For the text. It was stupid. I was just looking for an excuse. I’m trying not to do that. It’s harder than I thought.
The raw, unvarnished honesty of it disarmed her completely. No game, no charm. Just a clumsy admission of trying. Cadence felt the two realities inside her finally collapse into one, solid truth.
Cadence: What are you doing right now?
Another long pause.
Ryli: Sitting in my car. Outside the chemistry building. I have a TA meeting in twenty minutes about a lab I missed. It’s humiliating.
A laugh bubbled up in Cadence’s throat, unexpected and light. She could picture it perfectly: Ryli, in her intimidating Charger, dreading a meeting with a teaching assistant.
Cadence: Go to your meeting.
Ryli: Will you be here after?
The question was so straightforward, so devoid of agenda, it stole Cadence’s breath.
Cadence: Where?
Ryli: On my phone. Will you be there when I’m done?