Before the World Broke
Chapter One
The photo took eleven seconds to burn.
Ethan counted. He didn't mean to, it just happened some broken corner of his brain still functioning on autopilot while the rest of him had apparently clocked out and gone home. Eleven seconds. He'd have thought something that mattered that much would last longer. He'd have thought the universe would at least have the decency to make it dramatic. A slow curl of the edges, maybe. Some smoke with a little ambition.
Instead, just eleven seconds and then nothing. A small dark flake drifting onto his desk.
He stared at it.
The photo had been of the three of them him, Bella, Liam taken on a Sunday in October when the world had been stupid and golden and completely unaware of what it was setting him up for. Bella laughing at something Liam had said. Liam with his arm slung over Ethan's shoulder, the way he always did, like they'd known each other forever. Which they had. Which, apparently, meant nothing.
Ethan leaned back in his chair and looked at his ceiling.
There was a water stain up there that had been growing since November. He'd been watching it for weeks now the way it spread at the edges, slow and inevitable, ruining everything it touched. He found it oddly comforting. At least something in his life was consistent.
On the desk in front of him, beside the small black flake that used to be the three of them, sat a stack of letters.
Twelve of them now. Thirteen if you counted the one he'd ripped in half last Thursday and then taped back together at two in the morning because apparently his capacity for self-destruction had no floor. He'd written the first one three weeks ago, the night after he found out, when he couldn't sleep and couldn't cry and couldn't do anything useful with his hands except pick up a pen.
He hadn't sent any of them.
He wasn't going to.
That was sort of the point.
✦
The thing nobody tells you about betrayal the thing they leave out of every song and movie and sad-boy playlist is how mundane it feels afterward.
Ethan had expected to be destroyed. He had expected something operatic, something that would at least match the scale of what had happened. He'd expected to stop being able to function.
Instead, he got up every morning. He brushed his teeth. He went to school. He said "yeah, fine" when people asked how he was, and he was so convincing that he'd started to wonder if maybe he was actually fine and just hadn't noticed.
He was not fine.
He was in a very specific kind of not-fine that looked exactly like fine from the outside, which was somehow worse than the crying-in-the-bathroom version he'd imagined. At least that version would have been honest.
He picked up the stack of letters and held them for a moment. The weight of them was familiar now. Comforting, almost, in a way that probably said something unflattering about his mental state.
He set them back down without reading any of them.
He already knew what they said. He'd written them.
His phone buzzed on the bed.
He didn't look at it.
It buzzed again.
He still didn't look.
The third buzz made him pick it up purely out of spite some petty, irrational part of him wanting to confirm that yes, it was exactly who he thought it was, so he could have the satisfaction of putting it back down again.
It was Liam.
Three messages:
- Hey
-can we talk ?
-please ethan
Ethan read them once, then set the phone face-down on the desk.
Please Ethan. As if manners had anything to do with it. As if the right combination of lowercase letters could undo four years of best-friendship disintegrating in the span of a single afternoon. As if sorry could be a sentence when it needed to be a resurrection.
He picked up a pen.
He had a fourteenth letter to write