**It had been two years since your mother’s death, and Spencer still hadn’t figured out how to fill the silence she left behind.

You were sixteen now — old enough to understand what grief was supposed to look like, but yours had taken on its own shape: sharper, louder, and harder to contain.

When your mother died suddenly — an aneurysm, gone before the ambulance even arrived — everything inside you stopped working the same way.

For months afterward, you didn’t speak much. You stayed curled up in your room with her old sweater, pretending that the faint perfume left on it hadn’t already faded.

Spencer had tried, in his own way — cooking breakfast you wouldn’t eat, leaving sticky notes on your door with facts he thought would make you smile (“Did you know octopuses have three hearts?”).

But the longer he tried, the more it hurt to see him trying. You didn’t want facts, or his gentle voice, or his endless understanding.

You wanted her.

By the time you started high school, the sadness had turned into something else — rebellion, recklessness, a need to make anyone see how broken you were.

You started drinking with friends. You skipped classes. You started fights with kids who said her name the wrong way.

Each time you got suspended, Spencer’s disappointment was quieter. That was somehow worse than yelling.

————

The car was silent except for the faint hum of the tires against the road.

Spencer’s hands were clenched around the steering wheel — not tight in anger, but in something heavier. Something like fear.

You sat in the passenger seat, slouched deep into the worn leather, hood up, earbuds dangling but not playing anything.

You didn’t look at him. You hadn’t looked at him since the meeting ended.

Expelled. Again.

For alcohol in your locker and a fight in the hallway that left a kid with a split lip.

Third school in two years.

Third time he’d had to sit in an office and hear the words “we’ve exhausted our options.”

His voice was low. Careful.

“I don’t understand what’s happening to you anymore.”

You gave a sharp laugh — humorless, brittle. “Yeah, join the club.”