Chapter 8 — Betrayal
The whispers never stopped.
At first they were background noise—murmurs that skated off the marble and dissolved into the corners of rooms. But over the weeks since my father vanished they'd gotten sharper, honed until they cut. Every hallway I walked down felt like a runway where everyone watched my missteps. Every glance thrown my way was a reminder that I was no longer just Laurence Daisy. I was a headline, a rumor, a cautionary whisper. The girl with the missing father. The girl who lived in a mansion that might as well be a mausoleum.
And now… I was the girl who kissed the boy tied to the secret I didn't want to face.
That afternoon the cafeteria seemed to tilt under the weight of all those eyes. A group of girls giggled with their heads bent together, pretending to focus on their phones. A boy at a table a few seats away cupped his hands and mouthed something that looked suspiciously like—"Maybe her dad ran off with Adrian's family money." Laughter followed like the clatter of dropped trays.
My fingers tightened around the fork until my knuckles bleached white. It burned to breathe in a room full of people who thought they had the right to dissect me. I tried to make myself invisible. It doesn't work if you're famous for what you've lost.
"Laurence." His voice was soft, but it carried.
I didn't need to look up to know who'd slid onto the bench opposite me. Adrian's presence had weight; it landed and changed the air. He sat down like he belonged there—like he belonged everywhere—and the table trembled a little under him.
"Go away," I said, the words flat, brittle.
"Not until you listen." His voice was too calm, like someone keeping a lid on a kettle about to boil.
When I finally looked at him, I thought I might break. His hair was a mess; his shirt wrinkled where he'd raked a hand through it too many times. His eyes—those restless, stormy eyes—searched my face like he could map the hurt and find the hidden pieces. They were begging for something. Forgiveness? Understanding? Trust? I couldn't tell and I wasn't sure I wanted to.
"You lied to me," I said, low, the anger barely coiled beneath the words.
"I didn't lie," he shot back. "I just—"
"Didn't tell me the truth? That's the same thing, Adrian!" My voice rose before I could stop it. A few heads turned. The air around our table tightened, charged.
He leaned forward, elbows on the tabletop, voice dropping. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want to lose this. Whatever's between us. I wanted to figure it out myself before—before you found out like that."
The memory of our kiss—recent, warm, and impossibly wrong now—flooded me. Bitter and sweet all at once. I hated that the warmth still thrummed beneath my ribs.
"Save it." I pushed to my feet so fast the bench scraped and startled a few people. "I don't want to hear it."
He rose as well, following me as I stormed out. The chatter swelled behind us, whispers like a tail of smoke.
Outside, the air hit me like a slap. He caught up with me, and his hand brushed my arm; I jerked back.
"Don't touch me!" I practically snapped, spinning on him. My chest felt raw, every breath a small, painful movement.
"Laurence, please." His voice cracked in a way I hadn't heard before. "It's not what you think."
"Not what I think?" I laughed—too bitter for anything pretty. "You've been stringing me along. Sitting in my house, looking at my family pictures, letting me—" My throat closed around the word that used to taste like welcome. "Letting me fall for you while you kept this huge secret from me."
His jaw tightened. He closed the distance between us until the space was too small to breathe. His hand lifted without thinking and brushed my cheek. The touch was warm, shockingly tender, and it sent a dangerous current through me. For a second all the anger wavered.
"You think this is easy for me?" His voice was ragged. "You think I wanted to care about you?"
The vulnerability in him should have been satisfying. Instead it skewered me. My anger and want tangled so tightly I didn't know which pulled harder.
"I told myself not to get close," he said, words tumbling. "That you were the daughter of the man who ruined everything for my family. But then—" His breath hitched, his fingers—like they couldn't help it—brushed mine, desperate to hold on. "Then I kissed you, and nothing made sense anymore."
My heart felt like a fist twisting inside my ribs. I hated him for the secret and hated myself for the little traitor inside me that still remembered the way his mouth had fit mine.
"Get out of my life, Adrian." I spat the order like something that would set the world right.
He flinched as if I'd struck him, but his hand closed around mine anyway, gripping tight. The pressure of his thumb on my palm sent a strange, guilty warmth through me.
"I can't," he whispered. "Not when I know there's more to this. Not when I know your father didn't just disappear. Laurence, you need me."
I ripped my hand free, the motion tearing something between us. "What I need," I said, voice venom-laced, "is for you to stop pretending you ever cared."
Silence settled heavy and ugly between us. He stared at me—no snark, no sarcasm—just raw, open emotion like a wound. I'd never seen him like that.
"I did care," he said, hoarse. "I still do."
Without another word he turned and walked away, leaving me in the courtyard with the cold night wrapping around me like accusation.
The mansion looked like a piece of sculpture in the dark—beautiful, untouchable, and lonely. Inside, everything felt heavier. The laughter of the staff in the corridors sounded distant, like a show for people who belonged somewhere else.
I let the front door close behind me in a small, furious slam and pulled my bedroom door shut with a lock even though no one would come. I curled up on the bed, the photograph we'd found days ago clamped in my hands: my dad younger, arms slung over teammates' shoulders, his smile wide and easy. The man beside him—the one I'd recognized in the photograph at Adrian's house—was there in the corner of my memory like a splinter I couldn't pull free.
How could something that had felt so real—the warmth, the laugh, the kiss—be poisoned by one piece of evidence? How could someone whose mouth had felt like home be tied to the thing that broke mine?
I pressed the photo to my chest until the paper creased and my fingers felt the edges tear.
Tears came, finally, sloppy and hot. I hated myself for wanting him even as I hated him for what he'd kept. I had imagined a hundred ways this could go—not one of them included this jagged mixture of ache and anger.
Sleep, when it came, was fitful. I dreamt of hands—his, my father's—reaching and missing and pulling away.
Sometime past midnight I heard the front door downstairs. For a breath I sat up, hopeful and foolish. Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe she would notice I wasn't okay. Maybe she would knock.
My mother's heels clicked across the marble—slow, precise, deliberate. The sound always used to mean control. Tonight it sounded like distance.
I smoothed the hair away from my face with the heel of my hand and listened. The footsteps came up the stairs, and for a heart-stopping second I thought she'd pause, that she'd knock, or call my name. My heart lifted a fraction. Maybe she would come check on me, maybe she would ask if I'd eaten, maybe she'd offer an apology or the kind of touch that used to fix things when I was small.
But the steps continued, unchanging, and then—click. My mother's bedroom door shut.
No knock. No soft, "Laurence, are you awake?" No sitting down beside me on the bed with the small, awkward hugs we used to have when things were bad. Nothing.
The photograph slipped from my hands and landed face down on the carpet. I curled my fingers around nothing. The silence in the room roared loud enough that I could hear the tick of the clock in the hall like a judge's metronome.
In that suffocating quiet the truth cut through all the noise of school and betrayal: I wasn't just losing Adrian. I wasn't just losing my father.
I was losing my mother too.
And maybe—just maybe—I was losing myself.
I lay there until the guttering of the hall light told me the house was truly sleeping, until my tears dried into tracks across my cheeks, until the ache dulled into something numb and watchful. The photograph's blurred image burned into the back of my eyelids. Adrian's words, that ragged confession—I did care. I still do—looped like some fragile, guilty refrain.
I didn't know what I wanted more: for him to come back and explain, or for my mother to knock and apologize for all the ways she hadn't seen me. Instead I had silence and a shredded trust I didn't know how to mend.
When the sun finally cracked the horizon, it did nothing to fix the mess left in the night. The halls were the same as always—grand and echoing—but the world felt different, like someone had rearranged the furniture of my heart while I slept.
I got up, pulled on a uniform that felt like armor and left the room, carrying the photograph folded like a secret in my pocket. The whispers would be there again. The looks would be waiting. That much hadn't changed.
What had changed was me.