CHAPTER 8

Its Monday and Leo was at school early. He was always early. Not because he was particularly enthusiastic about the building itself but because early meant the hallways were empty and empty hallways meant no comments about his uniform and no navigating the social minefield that the school became once it filled up with people. He liked the school in those first quiet twenty minutes before the noise arrived. It felt like the place actually belonged to whoever was willing to show up for it, which in Leo's experience was the truest version of how anything worked.

He was at his locker when his phone buzzed. Then he looked at the screen. It was a number he didn't recognize. He stared at it for a second then answered. "Hello?"

Silence on the other end. Not dead silence, breathing silence. Someone there, not speaking.

"Hello?" Leo said again.

The line went dead.

He stood with the phone in his hand and looked at the screen for a moment. Unknown number. No voicemail. He thought about the black car outside his building on Saturday night. The window rolling down just enough. He thought about Richard Reyes and a fourteenth floor office and a conversation about a boy who had enrolled at Galveston High.

He pocketed his phone and closed his locker.

They're not just watching anymore, he thought. They're testing.

He was in his seat in 11B twenty minutes before anyone else arrived. He opened his notebook and tried to focus on the supply chain model he had been developing but the phone call kept pulling at the edges of his concentration. He turned it over in his mind the way he turned everything over, methodically, looking at it from each angle.

Whoever was in that car had his number now. Which meant they had been close enough at some point to get it. The only place his number existed in writing was on his school registration form. His employment form at the yard. And nowhere else, because he had no social media, no online presence of any kind. He was essentially a ghost in the digital world which he had always considered a disadvantage but was beginning to think might be the only thing protecting him right now.

The classroom started filling up around him, and immediately, Damon arrived and dropped into his seat and immediately sensed something. He had a gift for that, reading Leo's stillness the way some people read weather. "What happened?"

"Unknown number called me this morning," Leo said quietly. "Nobody spoke."

Damon processed this. "The car people?"

"Probably."

"Leo." Damon's voice was low and serious in a way it didn't always get. "I've been patient because I respect you. But I need you to hear me,  whatever is going on around you right now is bigger than a new student beef with Elvano. That boy is a lot of things but he's not sophisticated enough to run this kind of operation. This is coming from somewhere above him."

Leo looked at him. "I know."

"So what are you going to do about it?"

"Find out what they know," Leo said. "Before they find out how much I know."

Damon stared at him. "And how much DO you know?"

Leo was quiet for a moment. Then Elena walked into the classroom and both of them looked up simultaneously and the conversation folded itself away into the space where things waited to be continued later.

She came in with Grace, laughing at something, her hair pulled back today with a few strands loose around her face. She found her seat two rows ahead of Leo and sat down and then, like she knew exactly where he was without looking, she turned slightly and caught his eye and gave him one small nod, then he nodded back.

Damon watched this entire exchange with the expression of a scientist observing something developing in a petri dish. "You read chapter nine?" he murmured.

"Don't," Leo said.

"I'm just asking about the book…"

"Damon."

"Fine."

After class Elena fell into step beside him in the hallway naturally, the way she had been doing with increasing frequency over the past two weeks. Damon peeled off diplomatically toward the water fountain with the practiced ease of a man who had decided his role in this particular story was supporting cast.

"You look tired," Elena said.

"I'm fine."

"You always say that."

"Because I'm always fine."

She glanced at him sideways. "Did you read chapter nine?"

Despite everything, the phone call, the car, the weight of things he was carrying, something in Leo's chest shifted into something lighter. "Yeah," he said.

"And?"

"The case study about the textile company. The way they restructured their entire distribution model in under eight months." He paused. "I've been thinking about it since Saturday night."

Elena stopped walking. Just briefly, just long enough to look at him properly. "You read it Saturday night? After working a double shift?"

"I read four chapters actually."

She stared at him with an expression he was starting to recognize, the one that meant something he had said or done had reached past whatever professional admiration she had tried to keep this as and landed somewhere more personal. She recovered it quickly. "I told you chapter nine was insane."

"You were right," he said simply.

They walked in silence for a moment. Comfortable silence, the kind that had been building between them gradually over these weeks of bench lunches and corridor conversations and careful proximity. The kind of silence that meant two people had moved past the point where they needed to fill every space with words.

"Leo," she said quietly. "Can I ask you something personal?"

He looked at her. "You can ask."

"The accident. Your parents." She said it carefully, watching his face. "Do you ever, do you think about what actually happened? Like really think about it?"

Everything in Leo went very still.

"Why are you asking that?" he said. His voice came out steady. Controlled. But something behind his eyes had shifted and Elena was perceptive enough to catch it.

"Because of something my dad said last night," she said. "He came home late and he was on the phone when he came in and I heard him say Route 9 before he saw me and went quiet." She was watching Leo carefully now. "I don't know why that stuck with me. I don't even know why I'm telling you. But something about the way he stopped talking when he saw me…"

"What else did you hear?" Leo said. His voice was still steady but the steadiness was costing him now.

"Nothing. He said goodnight and went to his study and locked the door." She looked at him. "Leo, what is Route 9?"

Leo stopped walking.

They were in a quieter section of the hallway not, between buildings, the main crowd having flowed in a different direction. He turned and looked at her fully. Her father, Robert Hartwell. A man who ran multiple businesses in Texas and had never, as far as Leo knew, had any connection to a car accident twelve years ago on a road on the other side of the city.

Unless he did.

Unless the connections ran wider and deeper than Leo had been thinking.

"It's where my parents died," he said.

Elena's face changed. Something opened in it, pain, concern, the specific expression of someone who has accidentally put their hand on a wound they didn't know was there. "Leo I'm sorry, I didn't know…"

"Don't be sorry, it’s not like you killed them" he said quietly. "Just, if you hear your father say it again. I need you to tell me."

She looked at him for a long moment. "Okay," she said softly. "I will."

He couldn't concentrate for the rest of the day.

Robert Hartwell. He turned the name over and over in his mind all through Physics and all through the walk to the east wall bench at lunch and all through Elena sitting beside him reading while he stared at his notebook without writing anything.

She didn't push. She seemed to understand that he needed the proximity without the conversation right now and she gave him exactly that, just sat beside him in her quiet way and let him be in whatever he was in without trying to fix it or fill it.

He found himself looking at her at one point, just for a second, just from the side — and the specific way the afternoon light fell across her face did something to him that he didn't have the vocabulary for yet.

Stop it, he told himself.

But the instruction was getting harder to follow. That was the truth he had been trying not to look at directly for weeks now. Every wall he built she found the crack in without even trying. Without even knowing she was doing it. She just, showed up. With a book. With a question. With five quiet minutes on a bench. And every time she did the wall came back slightly shorter than before.

"You're doing it again," Elena said without looking up from her book.

Leo looked away quickly. "Doing what."

"Thinking so hard I can hear it." She turned a page. "Whatever it is, you don't have to carry it alone you know."

He looked at her profile. At the easy way she said things that cost other people enormous effort. "Easy to say," he said quietly.

She looked up then. Met his eyes directly. "I mean it Leo. I know we haven't known each other that long but…" She stopped. Something moved across her face, a decision being made in real time. "I care about what happens to you. I know that might sound strange given everything but I do."

The honesty of it sat between them like something physical.

Leo looked at her for a moment longer than was safe. Then he looked back at his notebook. "Read your book Hartwell," he said.

She looked at him for one more second. And then she smiled, slow, warm, slightly exasperated, and turned back to her book.

And Leo sat there with his pen not moving on the page and the wall around him not quite as solid as it had been that morning and the growing uncomfortable knowledge that he was running out of bricks.

He was almost at the school gate that afternoon when his phone buzzed again.

Same unknown number.

He answered immediately this time. "I know you're watching me," he said. "I know about the car. So either say what you need to say or stop calling."

A pause.

Then a voice. Male. Older. Calm in a way that had weight behind it, the calm of a person who is used to being the most dangerous presence in any room.

"You're brave," the voice said. "I'll give you that."

Leo's hand tightened on the phone. "Who is this?"

"Someone who has been watching you for a long time Leonard," the voice said. "Someone who knows things about you that you don't know about yourself yet."

Leo's heart was hammering but his voice came out steady. "What things?"

"Route 9," the voice said simply.

And then the line went dead.