It was 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I couldn't sleep. That wasn't new. I'd been an insomniac since freshman year, and my cure was always the same — lie in the dark of my dorm room and scroll Reddit until my eyes hurt. Amber, my roommate, called it my "digital rosary." She wasn't wrong.

I landed on a confession thread. Some anonymous account, a wall of text under a title that made my stomach drop before I even understood why: *I don't love her. I love someone else and I can't stop.*

I almost scrolled past it. I don't know why I didn't.

The details were too specific. *The girl with the round face and the softer body.* *The friend who's been out of reach for six years.* My hands went cold before my brain caught up. I read it again. Then a third time, slower, like if I read it carefully enough it would turn into something else.

He wrote that he only started dating her to stay close to someone. That she was convenient. That he laughed with strangers online about her thighs. That he closed his eyes when he touched her and thought of someone else.

I opened my texts with Kellan. The last one was from two hours ago. *Goodnight, love.* A little red heart under it.

I checked the post's timestamp. Forty minutes after that heart.

I didn't call him. I didn't call Sloane, either, even though some old, obedient part of me wanted to — wanted her to tell me it was a coincidence, wanted her to laugh and say *Ellie, that's not him, that's not us.* But I already knew. Six years. Out of reach. There was only one friend in Kellan's life who fit that description, and she was somewhere over the Atlantic right now, flying home from Paris.

I sat very still on my bed for a long time. Then I opened the app store and typed *calorie counter* into the search bar. I picked the first one that came up, the one with a cartoon apple for a logo, and set my daily limit to 800.

I lay down fully dressed and stared at the ceiling until the window went from black to grey.

Amber found me like that at seven, still in yesterday's jeans, my mascara dried into two grey half-moons under my eyes.

"You didn't sleep," she said. Not a question.

"No."

"You okay?"

"Didn't sleep well," I said, which wasn't a lie, exactly. I got up and started the coffee maker so she'd stop looking at me like that.

For the next few days I couldn't stop replaying us. Every memory came back different now, like someone had switched the lighting. I thought about the nights Kellan had been sweetest — the nights he pulled me in close, kissed my hair, told me I was beautiful in that soft, private voice. I used to think those were just his moods. Now I went digging.

I pulled up my camera roll and lined it up against Sloane's Instagram, scrolling back months, checking dates. A rooftop shot of her in Paris, laughing, wine glass tilted. That same night, Kellan had shown up at my door with flowers for no reason. A photo of her at some gallery opening, arm around a stranger. That same week, Kellan had been unusually attentive, texting all day, calling just to hear my voice.

The pattern wasn't loose. It was almost exact. Every time she surfaced online, he reached for me like I was something to hold on to. Not because he wanted me. Because he needed somewhere to put it.

I closed the camera roll. I opened the calorie app instead. It felt like the only thing in my life that still made sense — numbers going down, control going up.

I tried one small test. There was a concert that weekend, a band we'd talked about seeing since spring. I asked him Wednesday night, casual, my voice light. "Want to go Saturday? I still have to get tickets."

He didn't even look up from his laptop. "Can't. I've got a thing that weekend."

"What thing?"

"Just — stuff with the guys. I'll make it up to you."

He didn't say Sloane's name. He didn't say he was helping plan her welcome-home dinner, or that he'd offered to pick her up from JFK himself. I found that out later, by accident, the way I found out everything now — sideways, through a crack in a door he thought was closed.

That night, after he fell asleep on our shared laptop, I checked the browser history. Seventeen searches. Same flight number, refreshed over and over, like a heartbeat he couldn't stop checking.

I closed the laptop gently. I didn't slam it. I didn't wake him.

I went to bed and logged my dinner into the app. Six hundred calories. Two hundred under my limit.

It felt, God help me, like winning.

Sloane had been back four days when I started counting something new — not calories this time, but the seconds between Kellan's phone buzzing and his hand reaching for it.

Three seconds, usually. Sometimes two.

I noticed it Tuesday night while I stirred the risotto he liked, the one with the truffle oil that cost too much for a college kid's grocery budget but I bought it anyway, because I'd read somewhere that the way to a man's heart runs straight through his stomach, and I was done leaving anything to chance.

His phone lit up on the counter. He didn't even pretend not to look.

"Work stuff?" I asked, stirring.

"Yeah," he said. "Sloane's helping me figure out that gallery thing. The internship paperwork."

I kept stirring. "That's nice of her."

"She's good at that kind of thing."

I plated the risotto with the herbs on top, the way the recipe video showed, a little flourish of parsley like a green comma. He said it was delicious. He ate half of it and pushed the rest around his plate while he texted under the table.

I logged four hundred calories before bed. I told myself the truffle oil didn't count if I only tasted it.

That week I started running the Hudson path at five in the morning, before the sky even bothered to lighten. I liked the cold. It made my skin feel tight in a way that felt like progress. I'd come back, shower, and sit cross-legged on my bed with my laptop balanced on my knees, watching contouring tutorials until my eyes burned — how to carve cheekbones out of nothing, how to make a round face look like it had angles. I practiced in the mirror above my dresser. I got good at it. Good enough that Amber looked at me twice one morning and said, "You look different," and I said, "Just new blush," and she didn't ask again.

I bought a dress online at one in the morning, a size two, which was two sizes smaller than the one already hanging in my closet. When it arrived I hung it on the back of my door where I'd see it every time I left the room. It became a kind of altar. I'd look at it and think: *when I fit into that, everything will be different.* I never once asked myself different from what.

I started reaching for Kellan at night, too — pulling him closer, initiating things I didn't actually want, because some old animal part of me thought if I could just make his body want mine badly enough, the wanting would leak backward into his heart. I watched his face the whole time. Not out of intimacy. Out of research. I was looking for a flicker, a crack, some proof that he was there with me and not somewhere over the Atlantic, or in a bar in Bushwick, or wherever his mind actually lived now.

I never found it. His eyes stayed closed most of the time. I told myself that was normal. I told myself a lot of things.

He noticed something, though. Men always notice the thing that's convenient to notice.

"You've been weird lately," he said one night, propped on his elbow, studying me like I was a painting that had shifted slightly on the wall. "Distant."

"I'm fine."

"You flinch when I touch you."

"I don't."

"Ellie."

"I'm *fine*, Kellan." I softened it with a smile because I always softened everything. "Just tired. Midterms."

He believed me, or decided to. Two days later a delivery guy showed up at our dorm with a bouquet of white ranunculus, the expensive kind, the card signed just *K* with a little heart, the same heart he used to end every text. Amber opened the door because I was in the shower. When I came out, towel around my hair, she was standing there holding the flowers at arm's length like they might be radioactive.

"These are for you," she said. She didn't say anything else. She set them on my desk and went back to her side of the room and put her headphones in, which for Amber was its own kind of commentary.

That night he took me to a restaurant he'd "surprised" me with — a reservation, candles, the whole performance — and he held my hand across the table and told me I was beautiful in that low, private voice he used to use before any of this started, and I said thank you, and I meant it the way you mean anything you've said so many times it stops requiring you to be present for it.

I ordered the salmon. I ate half. I logged five hundred and eighty calories before I fell asleep, and I lay there afterward thinking about the dress on the back of my door, doing math that had nothing to do with numbers — how many more mornings on the Hudson, how many more skipped desserts, how many more versions of myself I'd have to shave away before there was nothing left to catch his eye and hold it.

Across the room, Amber opened a blank note on her phone. I saw the light of the screen against the ceiling before she turned it off.

I didn't ask what she wrote. I didn't need to. I already knew, somehow, that whatever it was, it had my boyfriend's name in it, and none of the softness he still performed for me at dinner.

The last thing I remember is Priya's voice, listing dates for the midterm, and the fluorescent light over the study table doing something strange — brightening, then swimming, like the whole library had been dipped in water. Then nothing. Then fluorescent light again, but different. Colder. A tube taped to the back of my hand.

"There she is." A nurse, moving into my line of sight, pressing two fingers to my wrist even though there was already a monitor doing that job. "Ellie, can you tell me the last time you ate a full meal? Not a snack. A meal."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out that made sense as an answer. I honestly didn't know.

She wrote something on a clipboard without saying whether that scared her.

Sloane got there first. I heard her before I saw her — heels on linoleum, fast, then the curtain ripping back on its little metal hooks. She stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at me for one second too long, and I watched her face do something I'd never seen it do before, a kind of controlled collapse, like she was holding a door shut with her whole body.

"Ellie." Just my name. Then she turned, and Kellan was in the doorway — he'd come in right behind her, jacket still half-zipped — and whatever had been on Sloane's face a second ago burned off into something else entirely.

"How did you not notice?" Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. "You sleep next to her, Kellan. Every night. How did you not *see* this?"

He stood there with his hands loose at his sides, and I watched him try to hold her gaze and fail, his eyes sliding off hers like water off glass. The nurse actually took a small step back, clipboard against her chest, like she'd walked into weather.

"I didn't — she said she was fine," Kellan said. "She kept saying midterms —"

"She's five foot six and she weighs what a fourteen-year-old weighs." Sloane's hand cut through the air between them. "You looked at her every single day."

I should have felt something at that — vindicated, maybe, or scared, hearing my own body described out loud like a diagnosis. Instead what I felt, lying there with a needle in my hand, was the old reflex kicking in before I could stop it.

"I'm sorry," I said. My voice came out thin, apologetic, aimed at Kellan. "I didn't mean to make a scene."

Sloane's head turned toward me so fast her hair moved. She didn't say anything. She just looked at me the way you'd look at something broken that you hadn't realized was broken until it fell and cracked open on the floor. I didn't understand that look yet. I filed it away like everything else — a small, strange thing to worry about later, when I had more room.

They kept me overnight for fluids. Kellan sat in the plastic chair by the bed and held my hand and told me I scared him, and I believed him, because I wanted to, because believing him took less out of me than the alternative.

He didn't once look at his phone the whole night. I noticed that, and felt something like relief, and didn't ask myself why noticing it mattered so much.

The days after I got home were quiet in a new way. Sloane started coming around more — bringing soup she claimed she made herself but which tasted exactly like the deli two blocks from her building, sitting on the end of my bed while I ate slowly under everyone's watching eyes. She didn't lecture me. She just stayed.

But I noticed she'd gotten quiet in a different direction, too. At Priya's birthday thing that Friday, I watched Sloane watch Kellan across the room — not the way you watch someone you like, more the way you watch a math problem you can't quite make add up. He'd angled his whole body toward her without seeming to move, the way water finds the low point in a floor. When he told a story about our sophomore year, it somehow ended up being about a hallway I didn't remember and Sloane definitely did, judging by the flicker that crossed her face.

"You okay?" I asked her later, in the kitchen, while she rinsed cups that didn't need rinsing.

"Fine," she said. Then, like she couldn't help it: "Does he always talk that much about high school?"

"Sometimes." I shrugged. "He's nostalgic."

She didn't answer right away. She was looking at the water running over her hands like it might tell her something. "Yeah," she said finally. "Sure."

I didn't think much of it. I was too busy counting how many bites of birthday cake I'd let myself have, too busy watching the dress on the back of my door get one wash cycle closer to fitting. I didn't know yet that Sloane had started remembering a hallway from years ago, a request she'd made without thinking twice, and the strange, hungry look on Kellan's face when she'd made it. I didn't know she'd started keeping her own kind of tally.

I just knew something in the room had shifted, quietly, the way weather shifts before you can name what's coming.