Chapter Six: The Wristband

Rory I found the first real clue on a Tuesday, hiding in a group chat that wasn't even mine to be in, at one in the morning, like a raccoon breaking into evidence. It started innocently — I'd been added, by accident, to the team group chat under my new name, a wall of noise from twenty-two guys arguing about pregame music and whose turn it was to bring tape, which is apparently a bigger controversy than international diplomacy. I almost muted it. I almost missed the entire thing. But I was scrolling half-asleep, guard fully down, when Duval posted an old photo for absolutely no reason other than nostalgia — a "throwback to freshman year" post that exists purely to embarrass people — and my whole body went cold before my brain finished catching up to why. It was a party photo. Off-campus, string lights, red cups, half the current team looking two years younger and significantly worse-dressed, which is genuinely saying something. And in the background, barely in frame, cropped at the shoulder like an accident — a girl laughing, arm slung around someone I couldn't fully see, dark hair, easy smile. Kora. I sat up so fast my desk lamp rattled. I zoomed in until the photo dissolved into pixels, heart slamming, and there it was, small and undeniable in the corner of the frame: a wristband. Thornebridge Athletics, navy and gold, the exact band every guy on my team had been issued for team events, looped around the wrist of whoever's shoulder my sister was laughing against. She'd been at a Thornebridge hockey party. Not a random college party at a random school. This one. My team. Months before the leak, months before her whole life detonated in real time, my sister had stood in this exact social circle, arm around someone close enough to this program to be wearing their gear like a membership card. I typed **"who's this from"** into the group chat and deleted it four times before I had the sense not to send it at all. Asking directly, as a brand-new rookie with two weeks on the roster, would take exactly one wrong turn to become the kind of question somebody remembered later and wondered why I'd cared so much about a photo from before I even transferred here. So I did what I'd done for three months straight. I went quiet, and I went digging like it owed me money. I cross-referenced the photo against Duval's post history, found the original upload buried four scrolls deep on some long-abandoned account, and matched the date against Kora's old texts — the ones I'd kept even after she begged me to delete everything from that summer because looking at them physically hurt her. It matched. Almost exactly. Weeks before the video leaked, my sister had been at a party thrown by this exact team. Which meant the leak wasn't some random jealous ex with a grudge and a grudge only. It was someone in *this* world. Someone who'd stood close enough to laugh with her in a stranger's backyard and later decided her worst moment was worth more shared than kept sacred. I sat on my bed at one in the morning with my laptop glowing in the dark, and for the first time since arriving at Thornebridge, the plan stopped feeling like a long shot and started feeling like something that might actually work — which terrified me considerably more than the doubt ever had, because a long shot you can walk away from. This, I was no longer sure I could. Because if the leak traced back to this team, it traced back to a small enough circle that it had to be someone I now saw every single day. A teammate. A friend of a friend. Possibly, God help me, one of the two faces I could no longer stop thinking about, for two extremely different and extremely inconvenient reasons. My phone buzzed. I nearly launched it across the room. **Jarvis:** you up **Jarvis:** don't lie I can see you typing in the team chat at 1am, weirdo I stared at the screen, thumb hovering, heart still going too fast from the photo, the wristband, the sudden horrible clarity of how much closer I now was and how much more there was left to lose if I got the math wrong. **Me:** can't sleep. big day tomorrow ig **Jarvis:** it's literally just conditioning **Jarvis:** unless you know something I don't I froze, certain for one paranoid second that he was fishing — that somehow, impossibly, he already knew everything. Then three dots appeared, and another message landed before I could recover any composure at all. **Jarvis:** anyway. Dray wants to meet you. Says he's "curious" about the new guy, which from him is basically a marriage proposal My stomach dropped straight through the floor and kept going. I typed and deleted four different responses, same as the group chat, same as everything lately, because there was no version of *your brother has been watching me like I'm a puzzle he's already halfway through solving and I think he's about to get the last piece* that I could send to the one person whose entire family I might be about to burn to the ground. **Me:** sounds great I set the phone down, screen dark, and lay back staring at the ceiling of my rented studio, the laundromat humming its death rattle two floors below, one photo now burned permanently into my memory, one twin already suspicious enough to send follow-up questions, and one girl four hundred miles away who had no idea her sister was weeks away from finally, actually understanding what happened to her. I didn't sleep. I couldn't. Somewhere on this campus was a wristband, a party, a name I hadn't found yet — and two brothers who were both, in wildly different ways, about to get a lot harder to lie to.