I move through my days like a ghost myself.
I go to class. I take notes I will never read. I eat food I cannot taste. The motions of living without actually being alive.
My professors call on me and I answer in monosyllables. My classmates try to make conversation and I smile the empty smile I learned from my mother.
I stop going to Iron Hour as well. I stop going anywhere, actually.
I looked up the price of a new headset. Five hundred dollars I do not have. My parents cut off my allowance the day they left — another punishment, another way to keep me in line.
All that family money, all those trust funds and investment portfolios, and I cannot afford to buy back the only thing that ever made me feel alive.
Maren texts me constantly.
Mar: Hey, haven't seen you in a while.
Mar: Is everything okay?
Mar: Nora, seriously, answer me.
I reply with fine and busy and later — lies that taste like ash on my tongue. She does not deserve my silence, but I do not know how to explain that the only part of me worth knowing is gone, shattered into pieces on my apartment floor.
At night, I stare at the ceiling and think about Ghost.
I imagine him logging in, waiting by the stone bridge, checking the time. I imagine him sending messages I cannot receive, his confusion slowly curdling into hurt. I imagine him waiting one night, then two, then a week.
Then giving up. Then forgetting me. Moving on.
Finding someone else to share the Quest Lands with, someone else to sit beside on virtual cliffs and trade secrets in the dark.
The thought makes me want to crawl out of my own skin.
Saturday afternoon there’s a knock at my door that I ignore at first. Then it comes again, harder. "Nora. I know you're in there. Open the door or I'm calling the building manager."
Maren.
I drag myself off the couch and unlock the deadbolt. She stands in the hallway with her arms crossed, her expression caught somewhere between fury and fear.
"You look like death," she says.
"Thanks."
"I'm serious."
She pushes past me into the apartment, her eyes already scanning space. The unwashed dishes, the drawn curtains, the blanket nest on the couch where I have been sleeping because my bed feels too empty.
"You haven't left this apartment in two weeks… What is going on with you?"
"Nothing. I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're the opposite of fine." She turns to face me. "You're coming to the unity event tonight."
"I don't want to."
"I don't care."
She walks into my bedroom without asking permission and I hear my closet door open, hangers scraping against the rod. She emerges with a black dress I forgot I owned and a pair of heels I have not worn since freshman year.
"You're going to shower," she says, thrusting the clothes at me. "You're going to put on something that doesn't have stains on it. And you're going to pretend to be a functional human being for three hours. That's it. Three hours."
I want to say no. I want to lock the door and disappear into the couch and never come out.
But Maren is looking at me with that stubborn love that refuses to let me vanish, and I do not have the energy to fight.
"Fine," I whisper. "Three hours."
The annual inter-college unity event spreads across a downtown rooftop.
String lights hang overhead, casting everything in artificial warmth. An open bar anchors one corner. Music pulses from speakers I cannot see.
Students from both schools cluster in predictable patterns — North Side near the entrance, West Side near the railing, the space between them charged with decades of inherited hatred.
Maren is already three drinks in and flirting with a West Side guy she would not glance at sober. I nurse a vodka tonic and scan the crowd, hyperaware of every leather jacket in the room.
I spot him before I mean to.
Danny leans against the far railing with a guy I vaguely recognize — dark-haired, broad-shouldered, wearing the same leather jacket. Raf, I think his name is, his best friend I heard of.
But Danny looks bored, irritated even. Like he would rather be anywhere else on earth.
Our eyes meet across the rooftop and he smirks. That insufferable, knowing smirk. The one he wore at the gym while I struggled beneath the bar.
The one that says ‘I see you, princess, and I am not impressed.’
I look away first as my pulse suddenly jumps, hating myself for it.
The crowd shifts and bodies rearrange. Somehow the distance between us shrinks without either of us moving toward the other.
I drift toward the quieter section of the balcony, away from Maren's laughter and the bass-heavy music.
When I turn around, Danny is there. City lights sprawl below us while music pulses muffled behind the glass doors. Neither of us acknowledges how we ended up alone together.
"Hell of a party," he says.
"If you say so."
"The administration really thinks one rooftop and some string lights will fix years of hating each other." He tilts his head, studying me with dark eyes I cannot read. "What do you think?"
"I think some rules exist for a reason."
"Yeah?" He leans against the railing, too close, taking up too much space. "You really believe that?"
"Don't you?"
He laughs. Low, knowing, too familiar. "Rules are optional."
The words hit me like ice water.
Rules are optional.
No way. It’s… Ghost's phrase.
The thing he said when I was scared to enter the Love Room. The thing that unlocked something in my chest. The thing I held onto in the dark while I fell apart, while I told him my secrets, while he kissed me and the lights bloomed around us.
The thing no one else in the world would know.
I stare at him and the rooftop noise fades to static. My mind races through every interaction, every collision, every moment I dismissed as coincidence.
The gym — how he always seemed to be there when I was. The bar — how he found me in the crowd, slid in beside me, called me princess with that edge in his voice.
The way he looked at me through all of it, like he could see straight through to the parts I keep hidden. The way Ghost looked at me. The same way. The exact same way.
My chest tightens and I cannot breathe. He notices me staring and a familiar slow grin spreads across his face.
"What's wrong, princess?" He tilts his head, cocky, amused. "Finally realized how hot I am?"
The words barely register. I am too busy drowning in the truth.
Ghost and Danny. Danny and Ghost.
The man who held me together in the dark is the same man who watched me struggle beneath a barbell and mocked me until I screamed.
"Nora?" His grin falters. "Hey. You okay?"
My real name. In his mouth. In the mouth that belongs to Ghost — the man I trusted with my secrets, the man I thought I lost forever when my father's heel came down.
My chest cracks open and everything I thought I knew rearranges itself into a shape I cannot recognize. "I have to go," I manage.
"What? We were just…"
I step back as he reaches for me, confused now, his hand brushing my arm, and the contact burns. I jerk away from him, my heart slamming against my ribs, my vision blurring at the edges. "Nora, wait!"
But I am already moving, already pushing through the crowd.
Past Maren's confused shout, past the string lights and the open bar and the rooftop full of people who have no idea that my world just collapsed.
I do not stop until I reach the elevator.
I do not look back.
