The call went about as expected.
They sat together at the small dining table, the phone placed between them on speaker.
The room felt too quiet, the walls too close.
Isaac could feel Aria's knee bump against his under the table, not from playfulness, but from how badly she was shaking.
Her fingers hovered above the phone screen for a long moment before she unlocked it, scrolled to her father's contact, and pressed call.
Beep…
Beep…
Beep…
Each ring tightened the knot in Isaac's stomach.
The call connected with a soft click.
[Aria?]
Her father's voice filled the room immediately, sharp and heavy, cutting through what little calm they had built.
Aria's breath hitched.
"Dad…" she murmured.
[Why did you do such a thing? Just why?]
The question came before she could say anything else, rushed and loaded, as if he'd been holding it in for days.
[I thought I raised you better than this…] he continued, anger and disappointment bleeding together. [Your mother and I don't even know what to do…]
"I didn't do it!" Aria blurted, voice trembling. "I didn't…!"
Isaac looked at her. Her hands were gripping the edge of the chair so hard her knuckles were white.
He forced himself to stay calm.
The silence on the other end was brief, but it felt longer.
[Then what were those photos?] her father demanded. [Why can't you just be honest? If you just told us the truth, we could figure this out, but you won't!]
Each word hit like a blunt strike.
Aria flinched with every accusation, as if he were standing in front of her instead of miles away.
"I'm telling you, they're fake! I didn't do anything—"
Her voice cracked again, wobbling on the edge of another breakdown.
Isaac leaned forward.
"Sir," he said, doing his best to keep his tone steady and respectful. "There's no way she did all of that. We're together most of the time—"
[You're part of the problem, boy!]
The words snapped out like a whip.
Isaac went still.
He didn't even get to finish his sentence.
[You live with her, don't you?] Aria's father continued. [You enable this behaviour. You cover for her. Do you think I don't understand how young people are these days?]
Isaac's jaw clenched.
He wanted to say that "behaviour" didn't exist, that there was nothing to enable.
He wanted to tell this man that his daughter was breaking under something she hadn't done.
But the force of that voice on the other end pushed him into silence.
Aria's hand slid along the edge of the table until it found his.
Her fingers curled around his knuckles, gripping tight.
He turned his hand and squeezed back, grounding her as best he could.
"I'm not lying!" Aria cried. "I didn't do any of that, I swear—I swear, Dad, please, you have to believe me—"
[If you didn't do it, then how did those photos appear?] he shot back. [Do you think people just make these things up out of nowhere?]
"Yes!"
'Of course they can, it's just boomers like you who don't understand!'
Isaac wanted to yell.
But he bit his tongue.
Every time he tried to interject, the man talked over him.
The conversation wasn't a conversation; it was a one-sided lecture spilling through the speaker.
[We trusted you, Aria.]
His tone hardened further.
[We let you move out, we let you live with some man because you insisted everything was under control, and this is what happens?]
"It's not like that!" she said, voice straining. "Isaac and I—we're not—"
Aria's throat closed around the words.
She couldn't even finish the sentence.
[Do you know how your mother cried when she saw those photos? Do you have any idea how ashamed we felt?]
Aria's shoulders shook.
Tears spilt down her cheeks, catching on her jaw before falling onto the table.
She covered her face with one hand, as if that might block the words from reaching her.
Isaac felt something twist painfully in his chest.
He tried again.
"Sir, with all due respect," he said, "those photos—"
[You will stay out of this, Isaac,] her father snapped. [You're not family. This is between us and our daughter.]
The words hit harder than Isaac expected.
Not because he wanted to be family, but because in this room, with Aria falling apart beside him, he felt more responsible for her than anyone else.
And yet, according to the man on the other end of the line, he had no right to speak.
Isaac's mouth pressed into a thin line.
He fell silent.
Helpless.
Unable to protect her from the one voice she had always struggled to go against.
The scolding continued.
He didn't shout.
That almost made it worse.
His tone was calm and steady, but every word was laced with disappointment, anger, and a kind of cold judgment that cut deeper than raised volume ever could.
He questioned her character.
Her decisions.
Her honesty.
Every time Aria tried to defend herself, the words fell apart halfway out of her mouth, swallowed by sobs or overridden by his.
Isaac sat there and listened to it all, unable to do anything that would not make it worse.
By the time the call finally ended, it felt like they had been sitting there for hours, even though the timer on the screen said otherwise.
The last thing her father said before hanging up echoed in the silence.
[Think about what you've done.]
Click.
The phone screen went dark.
For a moment, the only sound in the apartment was Aria's breathing, a broken, hiccuping mess of air and tears.
Then she folded in on herself.
Her hands came up, covering her face completely as the sobs she had been trying to suppress finally broke free.
She shook.
Not the quiet, contained trembling from earlier.
Full-body sobs that made her shoulders jerk, her breath catch, her voice vanish into raw, painful sounds.
"I'm sorry," Isaac said.
The words came out before he could stop them; useless, too small to carry everything he felt.
He wished he could've done more.
Stepped in stronger.
Cut her father off.
Found proof, somehow, in the moment that would have forced him to listen.
But he hadn't.
He had sat there, hand in hers, and let the call run its course.
He was a coward.
He reached out to touch her shoulder, but she flinched away, not out of rejection, just out of sheer overload.
She stood up abruptly, chair scraping across the floor.
Her steps were uneven as she stumbled toward her room.
The phone remained on the table, screen dark, as if it too had shut down from exhaustion.
"Aria—" he started.
She didn't look back.
The door to her room closed with a dull thud.
Click.
The lock slid into place again.
Isaac stayed at the table.
For a long time, he didn't move.
He stared at the phone lying between his elbows, his reflection faint in the black screen, and placed his head in his hands.
Guilt pressed down on him until it hurt to breathe.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
No tears came.
Just the weight.
The knowledge that when she needed someone to stand between her and the person tearing her apart, all he had managed to do was sit there and listen.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
The days after were blurred.
Time didn't pass in clear blocks anymore; it just smeared together into a loop of waking up, working, cooking, knocking on doors, and listening to silence.
Aria barely emerged.
Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of her, slipping down the hallway in an oversized hoodie, hair tied up messily, moving like she wanted to be invisible.
She would mumble something about the bathroom or needing water, and then disappear again behind her door before he could say much of anything.
Other days, he didn't see her at all.
"Isaac, I'm fine," she would mutter through the door if he pushed too hard. "Just… leave it outside."
Her voice sounded wrong.
Hollow.
Thinner every time.
Whenever the subject even brushed against what had happened, the blackboard, the photos, her parents, her eyes turned frantic, her words stumbling over themselves.
"I didn't do it," she repeated whenever the topic neared, the phrase bursting out of her like a reflex. "I didn't… I didn't do it, I swear."
She said it as if she expected him to stop believing her if she didn't say it enough.
As if the silence on the other end of the phone had carved the doubt so deep into her that she couldn't separate other people's disbelief from his.
"I know," he would answer, but the words felt weak in the face of that kind of fear.
It didn't matter how many times he told her he believed her.
The weight of everyone who didn't believe her was heavier.
That left him in his current situation.
Knock. Knock.
"Breakfast is out here," Isaac called, standing in front of her door once again, a tray balanced in his hands. "Leave the dishes in the sink when you're done. I'll wash them when I'm back."
He waited.
The hallway was quiet.
No reply came, not even the soft scrape of footsteps.
He stared at the door for a few seconds, listening like he could somehow hear through wood and paint if he concentrated hard enough.
Nothing.
He exhaled slowly and set the tray down on the floor beside the doorframe.
On the plate were scrambled eggs, toast with too much butter the way she liked it, and a sliced apple arranged without much finesse.
Next to the plate sat a mug of coffee, still steaming faintly.
"Message me if you need anything…" he added, almost out of habit.
The words felt repetitive now, worn down by how often he had said them over the last two weeks.
He lingered in the hallway for a moment longer, then turned away.
He wasn't sure how to navigate any of this.
As far as he could remember, Aria had always been as bright as a sunflower, loud, expressive, and relentlessly cheerful.
She smiled so often that people treated it like part of her identity.
The rare times she frowned were usually over something trivial: a failed recipe, a bad grade, running out of snacks.
This was different.
This wasn't a mood.
This was Aria in a state so bad that she refused to leave the apartment at all.
He moved into the kitchen mechanically and began cleaning what little remained of his own breakfast. His mind wasn't on the dishes.
It kept circling back to the same questions.
'How do I fix this? What am I supposed to do?'
He had told her again and again that he believed her.
That the photos weren't real.
That the words on the board were garbage.
But his reassurances felt clumsy, flimsy against the weight crushing her.
He wasn't good with this kind of thing.
He wasn't the person who gave stirring speeches that made everything better.
All he knew how to do was be there, cook, clean, sit nearby and try not to say anything stupid.
At night, after he had finished tidying up, he would sit outside her door, back against the wall, phone beside him on the floor.
"Hey," he would say, staring at the ceiling. "You remember that time you tried to make pancakes without reading the instructions and almost set the stove on fire?"
Silence.
He would keep talking anyway.
"And the time you spilt coffee on my laptop but somehow only managed to ruin the sticker and not the actual computer? Talent. Truly."
Sometimes, in the quiet that followed, he thought he heard something.
A quiet sniff.
A stifled breath.
Once, he was sure he heard the soft, broken sound of crying on the other side of the door, so faint he almost convinced himself he had imagined it.
Other nights, there was nothing.
Not even the creak of the bed.
He would eventually slide down until he was half-lying, half-sitting on the floor, staring at the faint line of light under her door until his eyes blurred.
He kept telling himself that she would be fine.
That this was temporary.
That she was too stubborn, too strong, to stay broken like this forever.
But the longer the silence stretched, the more those thoughts felt like lies he was telling himself so he didn't have to admit how scared he really was.
The feeling gnawed at him.
A constant, low ache beneath his ribs that made everything, from work to walking through campus, feel heavier.
He washed dishes.
He went to work.
He answered messages from classmates asking why they hadn't seen him or Aria around.
He ignored the ones that mentioned "those rumours."
And every time he came home, he went straight to her door.
Knock. Knock.
"Lunch," he would say some days.
"Dinner," on others.
"Message me if you need anything…"
Sometimes the food disappeared.
Sometimes it didn't.
He never mentioned it.
He just kept cooking.
Kept talking through the wood at night.
Kept pretending that holding their life together at the edges was enough.
Even as he felt it slowly slipping through his fingers.
————「❤︎」————