After I Found His Secret Reddit Confession to My Best Friend

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.