The next few days were a fragile kind of peace, the type that feels like walking on cracked glass. Damien and I were talking again, sharing meals, sleeping in the same bed, even making love one night with a kind of desperate tenderness that left us both silent afterward. But the photos were still there, hanging between us like smoke that wouldn’t clear. Every time my phone buzzed, I saw him tense. Every time I came home late from studying, his eyes asked questions he didn’t voice.
I thought we were slowly repairing things. I was wrong.
It happened on a Wednesday afternoon.
I had stayed late on campus to finish a group project in the law library. Alex had been in the same section, working with his own students, but he’d kept his distance since I shut him down. Or so I thought.
I was pac
