Chapter 14 What's Left Behind

• I don't tell Daniel about the letter. I don't tell him about the strand of hair either, sitting now in a small plastic bag in my desk drawer like evidence in a case nobody else knows is open. I just go quiet, the kind of quiet that worries people more than yelling ever would, and he watches me across the room some nights like he's waiting for me to either explain or fall apart.
• Weeks pass. The substitute becomes permanent. The business ethics elective goes back to being an ordinary class with an ordinary professor, nothing strange about the lighting, nothing gold flickering behind anyone's eyes. Life resumes its normal shape around the hole she left in it, the way life does, indifferent to the fact that mine doesn't feel normal at all anymore.
• I do the thing she told me not to do.