Lucas held Ethan's phone as though it might burn him.

The preview beneath the selfie remained on the lock screen. Northstar's name. One sentence that had somehow made Lucas go pale.

Ethan crossed the room and took the phone from his hands.

"You shouldn't look through other people's messages," he said.

Lucas stood immediately. "I wasn't."

"You were sitting on my bed with my phone."

"It was unlocked."

"That is not a defense."

Lucas's face hardened. "I said I wasn't looking through it."

For a moment they stood too close, their argument small enough to be private and sharp enough to draw blood.

Then Lucas looked at the screen again.

"Who is Northstar?" he asked.

Ethan's grip tightened.

He had prepared himself for dozens of possible questions.

Who is your boyfriend? Why do you call someone sweetheart? Who is Wren?

He had not prepared for this one.

"A friend," he said.

Lucas gave a short, humorless laugh. "You always answer like that when you don't want someone to ask again."

"Maybe people should take the hint."

"Maybe you should stop acting like everything is a game."

The words landed harder than Lucas intended. Ethan saw it in his face a second later, the regret already forming behind his eyes.

But Ethan was tired of softening every truth for him.

"I learned from the best," he said.

Lucas flinched.

Neither of them slept well.

The next morning, Lucas left before Ethan woke up. His bed was made, his desk cleared except for the sketchbook and a note written on the back of a receipt.

I have class until four. We should talk tonight.

There was no signature.

Ethan crumpled the note once, then smoothed it flat again.

He had a shift at the campus library at noon and a rent payment due on Friday. Two hundred and eighty dollars sat in his wallet: cash he had saved from tutoring, leftover grocery money, and the small emergency amount his mother had pushed into his hand during his last visit home.

She had called it “for the bus.”

It was not for the bus. It was for whatever went wrong next.

Ethan hated touching it.

He checked his wallet twice before leaving for work, then tucked it into the locked drawer of his desk. He did not trust the thin dormitory lock, but he trusted it more than leaving cash in his backpack.

At the library, the hours dragged. He shelved books, answered questions about printing, helped a first-year student find an article that had been sitting exactly where the catalogue said it was. Every quiet moment returned him to the note on his desk.

We should talk tonight.

Lucas had never asked for a conversation in writing before.

At three forty, Ethan opened Discord under the circulation desk.

Northstar was offline.

The absence should not have disappointed him.

When Ethan got back to Cedar Hall, Derek Morrow was sitting in the common room with his feet on the coffee table. A sports highlight played silently on the television. He had a bag of chips balanced against his stomach and an expression that suggested he had been waiting.

"You look like hell," Derek said.

"Good afternoon to you too."

"Long night?"

Ethan kept walking.

"Lucas told me you two were fighting," Derek called after him.

Ethan stopped.

Derek smiled around a chip. "What? He didn't?"

The answer was obvious. Lucas had not told Derek anything. Lucas barely spoke to Derek except to ask him to move his laundry.

"Stay out of it," Ethan said.

Derek lifted both hands in false surrender. "I am out of it. Just wondering why Mr. Perfect looks like somebody kicked his dog."

Ethan walked away before he said something he would regret.

Their bedroom was empty. Lucas's side still looked untouched, as if he had not come back between classes. Ethan went straight to his desk, opened the drawer, and reached for his wallet.

His fingers closed on nothing.

At first, he assumed he had moved it.

He checked the desk surface, the floor, his backpack, the pocket of yesterday's jeans. Then he pulled every notebook from the drawer and shook them one by one.

Nothing.

His breath began to shorten.

The drawer was still locked.

He searched his closet. The space under the bed. The stack of design folders behind the monitor. He emptied the trash can with shaking hands and found only crumpled printouts and a coffee cup.

The wallet was gone.

Ethan sat on the floor, staring at the empty drawer.

He did not cry. He was too angry for that.

He heard voices in the hall ten minutes later. Derek's loud laugh. Miles's quieter response. Then Lucas's measured footsteps approaching the room.

Ethan stood before they came in.

"Did either of you come in here today?" he asked.

Miles blinked. "No. Why?"

Derek leaned against the doorframe. "I grabbed my charger this morning. That's it."

Lucas looked directly at Ethan. "What happened?"

"My wallet is missing."

The room went still.

"How much?" Lucas asked.

Ethan hated the question. He hated that the answer made his problem sound ordinary.

"Two eighty."

Derek whistled. "You keep that much cash in a dorm room?"

"It was locked in my desk."

"Maybe you dropped it."

"I did not drop a wallet from a locked drawer."

Lucas moved past him and checked the desk, then the floor around it. His expression had become practical, guarded. Ethan recognized the look. It was the one Lucas wore while solving a problem that did not involve feelings.

"Who has a key?" Lucas asked.

"Me. Housing. Possibly someone with a screwdriver and bad morals."

Derek snorted. "Okay, dramatic."

Ethan rounded on him. "I did not ask you."

Lucas straightened. "We'll look."

"We?"

"If it is in the room, we can find it."

The word

we

should have helped.

It did not.

Derek performed concern with irritating enthusiasm, opening closets and looking under mattresses as though he had volunteered for a search party. Miles checked the bathroom and common-room cabinet. Lucas searched his own desk, then Ethan's backpack again, quietly and thoroughly.

Ethan watched all of them.

When Lucas knelt beside his bed, something in Ethan's stomach dropped.

"Lucas," he said.

Lucas looked up. "What?"

"Don't."

The hurt that crossed Lucas's face was quick but unmistakable. "You think I took it?"

"I didn't say that."

"You just did."

Ethan looked away.

Derek, beside Lucas's bed, made a soft sound. "Uh. Guys?"

He reached beneath the frame and pulled out Ethan's wallet.

For one impossible second, nobody moved.

Then Derek flipped it open.

"Well," he said. "That's convenient."

The cash was still inside.

Every bill.

Ethan could see the blue edge of the envelope his mother had folded around the emergency money. He could see his student ID in the plastic window.

He also saw exactly where Derek had found it.

Under Lucas's bed.

Lucas went white.

"I didn't put that there," he said.

His voice was quiet, but it cracked on the last word.

Ethan looked at the wallet. At Lucas. At Derek, whose expression was now perfectly shocked.

"I know," Ethan said.

But the room had already changed.

Miles shifted his weight. Derek looked from Ethan to Lucas with open calculation. Lucas stared at Ethan as though he had said the wrong thing.

"You know?" Lucas repeated.

"I said I know."

"Then why are you looking at me like that?"

Because it was under your bed. Because I do not know whom to trust. Because you are Northstar and Lucas and neither version of you has ever given me the whole truth.

Ethan could not say any of it.

"I don't know what happened," he said.

Lucas laughed once, bitterly. "Right."

Derek cleared his throat. "Maybe we should get the RA."

"No," Ethan said at once.

All three of them looked at him.

He could not bear the thought of Naomi making a report. Of campus security coming in. Of his cash becoming evidence. Of Lucas being watched by strangers because someone wanted to hurt Ethan.

"The money is here," he said. "That's enough."

Lucas's eyes darkened. "It isn't enough for me."

He walked out before Ethan could answer.

The door hit the wall so hard that Derek's chips spilled onto the floor.

Miles stayed behind long enough to say, "You know Lucas wouldn't do that."

"I know," Ethan said again.

Miles looked at him sadly. "Then stop making him prove it alone."

After they left, Ethan locked the wallet inside his desk and sat on his bed until the sun disappeared.

Lucas did not come back for dinner.

At nine, Ethan's phone lit up with an incoming Discord call.

Northstar.

He watched it ring until it stopped.

Then another message appeared.

Northstar: Please answer.

Ethan typed three words, deleted them, and typed again.

Marigold: I can't tonight.

The reply came after a long pause.

Northstar: Did something happen with your roommate?

Ethan stared at the screen, cold spreading through him.

Of course Lucas would ask that.

Of course Northstar would know the exact shape of the wound without knowing he had caused it.

Before he could answer, the bedroom door opened.

Lucas stood on the threshold, rain darkening the shoulders of his jacket. His hair was wet. His face was shut down in the way Ethan had learned to fear.

His eyes went to Ethan's phone.

Then to the Discord message.

"You were talking to him," Lucas said.

"No."

"You were going to."

Ethan stood. "What do you want?"

Lucas closed the door behind him.

"I want to know why you don't believe me."

"I said I do."

"No. You said it because you wanted the conversation to end."

Ethan's throat tightened.

Lucas took a breath that shook at the edges. "Where did the money come from?"

The question was so wrong that Ethan did not understand it at first.

"What?"

"Two hundred and eighty dollars. You said you were short on rent last week. Then you have cash hidden in a drawer. You disappear into voice calls with a man who sends you things and calls you sweetheart—"

"Stop."

"—and now you're refusing to report a theft that makes me look guilty."

"Stop talking."

Lucas's face twisted. "What am I supposed to think, Ethan?"

Ethan's eyes burned. "You are supposed to think I am your roommate."

"I am trying to. But you won't tell me anything."

"Because it is not yours to know."

"Then why did you make it mine?"

The question cut through every defense he had.

Lucas looked at the wallet on Ethan's desk and then back at him.

"Are you taking money from someone you barely know?" he asked, quieter now. "Are you letting someone buy access to you because you're scared about rent?"

The silence after that was enormous.

Ethan felt something inside him go still.

Not anger.

Something worse.

"Get out," he said.

Lucas blinked. "Ethan—"

"Get out of my room."

"It is my room too."

"Not tonight."

Lucas stared at him for a long time.

Then his gaze dropped to Ethan's phone, where Northstar's unread message waited like a private betrayal.

"So you knew who I was," Lucas said.

Ethan stopped breathing.

Lucas's face had gone colorless.

"And you still let me think you wanted someone else?"