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.

The restaurant had low gold lights and bread that came with honey butter, same as our first anniversary. I picked the same table on purpose. I wore the dress I'd starved myself into, and I felt the zipper sit easy against my ribs, and I told myself that was a good sign for the night.

The scarf sat folded in my lap, wrapped in tissue paper I'd ironed flat with my hands because we didn't have an iron in the dorm. Six weeks of stitches. I kept smoothing the paper down even though it didn't need smoothing.

Seven o'clock came and went. I ordered water and told the waiter I was waiting on someone.

At seven-thirty, my phone buzzed. *running late, so sorry.* I typed back *no worries, take your time* and meant maybe half of it.

At eight-fifteen: *almost there, traffic is brutal.* There is no traffic that brutal on Christmas night. I knew that. I ordered a second water anyway, because ordering something felt like doing something.

A couple sat down beside me, laughing about a gift he'd already ruined by opening early. They left. Another couple took their place, and then another, three rounds of people who had somewhere to be together and got there. Two tables over, a man got down on one knee and the whole restaurant did that thing restaurants do, glasses raised, a small burst of applause I didn't join because my hands were full of a scarf nobody was coming to open.

At nine: *leaving soon.*

I rearranged the tissue paper again. Smoothed a corner that had already been smooth. I thought about calling him and didn't. Calling meant asking, and asking meant hearing the answer, and I wasn't ready yet to know which lie he'd pick.

Instead I did what I always did when I needed to hurt myself in a way that felt like control. I opened the Reddit post under the table, screen brightness low, and read it again. *The girl with the round face and the softer body.* I knew every word by then the way you know a scar, without needing to look at it to feel it. I read it through twice, and the second time, something in my chest went very still and very cold, colder than the water I kept ordering.

At nine-forty: *give me twenty minutes.*

I didn't cry. I want that on the record, even if only I ever read it. I sat with my spine straight and my water glass sweating a ring onto the white cloth, and I watched the door, and the door did not open for me.

I didn't know it yet, but twenty minutes had stopped meaning anything to him hours ago.

He was in Bushwick, in a friend's apartment with the furniture pushed back and Christmas lights taped crooked around a window, and he'd told himself he'd stay for one drink because Sloane had texted the group chat that she was coming, and one drink had never once in his life stayed one drink where she was concerned. She walked in with her coat still dusted with snow and the whole room turned toward her the way a room turns toward a draft, and something in him turned too, all the way, the way it always did, the way it had for six years before I ever had a name in his life.

He took shots she waved off. He laughed too loud at things that weren't that funny. By nine he was standing close enough to her at the bar that their sleeves touched, watching her face like a man outside a lit window in winter, and he ordered another round, and somewhere in that motion the reservation, the restaurant, the dress, the scarf, all of it slid out of his mind like water off glass.

I didn't know any of that at ten o'clock. I only knew that twenty minutes had come and gone twice over, and the busboy had started giving me the look busboys give a woman alone at a table for two, and the man who'd proposed two tables over was feeding his new fiancée cake off his own fork.

Something in me — the part that had been running the numbers for weeks, the part that had cross-referenced flight statuses and browser histories and the seconds between a phone buzzing and a hand reaching for it — that part stood up before the rest of me decided to.

I paid the check. I left a good tip, because none of this was the waiter's fault. I picked up the scarf, still in its tissue paper, and I walked out into the cold and got into the first cab idling at the curb.

"Bushwick," I said. "I'll pay cash."

I didn't text him. I didn't call. I just held the scarf in my lap the whole ride, the way I'd held it at the table, like it was still a gift, like there was still a version of tonight where I got to give it to him.