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.

They discharged me on a Thursday with a bag of pamphlets and a business card for a nutritionist in Murray Hill. The nurse circled the phone number twice in blue pen, like circling it harder would make me call it. I put the card in the zippered pocket of my backpack, the one where I keep things I plan to forget about.

I didn't call.

At home, the dress was still on the back of my door, size two, waiting like it had been waiting the whole time I was gone. I took it off the hanger before I even put my bag down. I don't know why. I just wanted to know.

It slid on easy. Too easy. The zipper went up without me having to hold my breath, without the little hop-and-tug I used to do with dresses that fit right. I stood in front of the mirror above my dresser and looked at myself for a long time.

I thought I'd feel something like winning. That's what I'd been chasing every morning on the Hudson, every skipped dinner, every eight hundred calories logged into a cartoon apple. I thought there'd be a flash of light, a door opening somewhere.

There wasn't. There was just a girl in a mirror, in a dress that used to be a goal and was now just fabric, looking thinner and somehow smaller in every way that mattered. I turned sideways. I turned back. Nothing in my chest lifted.

I felt like I'd won a prize I didn't want anymore, and lost something on the way to winning it that I didn't have a name for yet.

I took the dress off, folded it instead of hanging it, and put it in the bottom drawer where I wouldn't have to look at it every time I left the room.

I started the scarf that week. Cable-knit, charcoal grey, Kellan's favorite. I told myself it was a gift, which was true, and I told myself it was love, which I needed to believe more than I actually did.

Amber watched me from her bed some nights, over the top of her laptop, not saying anything. She had a way of pretending not to watch that was its own kind of watching. Once she said, "That's a lot of yarn for a guy who wears the same three sweaters on rotation."

"He'll wear it," I said.

"Sure," she said, and went back to her screen.

I worked on it most evenings, the needles clicking soft in the quiet, six weeks of stitches that were really just six weeks of me negotiating with a story I didn't want to put down yet. Every row felt like proof. Proof that I still believed in something, even if I couldn't say what.

I booked the Christmas dinner reservation myself — the West Village place, the one from our first anniversary, the one with the low lights and the bread that came with honey butter. Seven p.m., December twenty-fifth. I told Kellan the date three weeks ahead, on purpose, the way you tell someone something you want them to actually remember.

"Christmas night, seven," I said. "I already booked it."

"Perfect," he said, not looking up from his phone.

I wrote it in my planner in pen. I circled it, the way the nurse circled that phone number. Some part of me must have known already that circling things doesn't make people show up.

The week before Christmas, he got sweet again. Really sweet, the kind that used to make my whole chest go warm before I learned to ask why. He texted more. He wanted to pick out a tree, even though our dorm room barely fit a desk lamp, let alone a tree — we ended up getting a two-foot one from a bodega and he strung it with lights like it mattered. He started talking about New Year's, about a rooftop somewhere, about fireworks over the water.

I said yes to all of it. I let myself enjoy it, even though some cold, careful part of me — the part that had learned to check browser histories and count the seconds before he reached for his phone — kept waiting for the other thing. The pattern. The thing underneath the thing.

At night, under the blankets, I pulled up the Reddit post again. I had it memorized by then — *the girl with the round face and the softer body, the friend who's been out of reach for six years* — every word sitting in me like something swallowed and never digested. I read it anyway. Pressing on a bruise to make sure it still hurt, maybe. Making sure I hadn't imagined it, now that he was being kind again and kindness had a way of making memory feel unreliable.

Amber got up around three one night for water. I felt her cross the room in the dark, felt the mattress dip when she paused by my bed. I didn't move. I kept my phone under the blanket, the screen turned low, but the light must have shown through anyway, blue and small.

She didn't say anything. I heard the soft click of a glass being set down on my nightstand, and then her footsteps going back to her own bed, and then nothing.

In the morning the water was still there, untouched, a little ring of condensation on the wood. I drank it before I got up. I didn't mention it. Neither did she.