“What’s wrong?”

She stares at me hard and I grow fidgety underneath her overpowering gaze. “My mother came to visit me,” she says with her attention fixed on me.

My expression plummets. “Sorry. That sucks. I know how much you hate your visits with her.”

“Do you?” She searches my eyes for something.

“Well, it always seems that way.” I fiddle with the leather band on my wrist, wondering what the hell has caused her deep assessment of me. “I mean, I’ve seen her visit once and leave your house another time, and both times, it seemed like seeing her shook you up.”

She bites down on her lip so forcefully the skin around her mouth turns white. “Did you tell my father we went out last night?” she sputters.

My body locks up and begs me not to answer, but fear of going against Doc burns in my throat, right beneath my scar. “I had to,” my hands lie for me.

Instead of yelling at me, she folds her arms and sinks back in the sofa. “Okay.” Her knee restlessly bounces up and down as her teeth sink deeper into her lip, drawing blood.

I round the coffee table and stand in her line of sight. “I had to. It’s part of my job.” My eyes plead with her to understand, but how could she? All she knows is that I work for her father, nothing more.

“Okay, I understand.” She rises from the sofa and starts for the hallway, brushing past me. “I’m going to go work on the assignment.”

I open my mouth, wishing I could call out to her, but not a single sound passes my lips. She shuts the door, disappearing into her room.

I grit my teeth, wanting to scream. But like always, the silence wins.

Over the next few days, Emery and I manage to finish our Creative Writing partner project without actually working together on it. We fall right back to our old routine of barely speaking, only it feels worse this time. After dancing, laughing, and getting drunk, then spending the night together, I was reminded of the spark between Emery and I, reminded of what I was missing out on over my choice to keep working as an informant.

When Wednesday rolls around, we drive to the University of Wyoming together, per her father’s instructions. The drive is quiet and painful. Ten times I almost break down and tell her that it wasn’t me, that I didn’t betray her trust—that her father made me—but I’m starting to realize that the sole fact that I listened to her father in the first place will cause Emery to distrust me.

By the time we make it to the classroom, I’m sweating bullets from the stress. I’ve barely slept more than a few hours a night, spending a lot of time writing in my journal about my future, about my wants, about Emery.

Emery, Emery, Emery, she fills my head too much.

Consumes my thoughts.

I’m getting in too deep.

I need to get out,

but how?

How can that happen?

When I don’t want it to end.

Don’t want her to go.

Thankfully, being at school offers a distraction from the tension between Emery and me. We still have to sit by each other because Doc has made it pretty clear I’m not to let her out of my sight.

“I think we’re going to fail the assignment,” Emery mutters, frowning at her paper on the desk.

I jump from the sound of her voice. I think it might be the first time she’s spoken to me since she asked me if I told her father.

I pop my knuckles then lift my hands in front of me. “We’ll be fine,” I sign when she looks up at me again. “You’re a good writer.” I offer her an encouraging smile.

I expect her to stop interacting with me, so she surprises me when she says, “You’ve never read anything I’ve written, so how could you possibly know that?”

Not entirely true, but I’m not about to declare that to her. When I first saw Emery, she’d thrown a handful of shredded journal pages out her window. I picked them up and caught a glimpse of a few of them. She wrote about her brother in such a way that I wondered if something tragic happened to him. After a crazy night with Doc, I learned that Emery’s brother is in a coma because of a heroin addiction.

“True.” I inch closer to her when the professor enters the classroom. Her body stiffens from my nearness, but I only inch closer, breathing in her scent. She smells fucking amazing, like vanilla and apples. “But I’ve seen how intense you get when you write. That much intensity has to come out pretty well on pages.”

“Everyone’s intense when they write,” she utters quietly. “You are.”

I offer her a lopsided smile that feels faker than my persona. “But I’m an excellent writer, so that just proves my point.”

A trace of a smile touches her lips but then she starts biting her nails, a nervous habit of hers. “I don’t want to be mad at you.”

My heart squeezes in my chest like a vice grip. “Then don’t be.”

“I have to,” she whispers, her eyes wide. “You told him we went out.”

“I had to,” I press back, silently begging: please, please understand. “I don’t have a choice.”

“I’m starting to learn how wrong that statement is,” she mutters with a frown. “We always have a choice. Sometimes the choices just suck.”

I sigh heavily. “I don’t know what else to say besides I’m sorry.”

She shrugs, fiddling with the top button on her red tank top. “There’s really not much else you can say. I get it. You had to do your job. I just don’t know why you made such a big deal about me keeping our outing a secret when you were planning on telling him.”