Jaxon POV
I couldn't stop thinking about the list. Ten apartments. Ten chances. Gone. Riley hadn't told me about Apartment Number Ten. She hadn't needed to. I'd seen enough over the past week to know what another rejection looked like. The hesitation before answering a question. The forced smiles. The way she always volunteered to stay behind and clean up after practice, as though keeping busy was easier than going back to Cedar Hall. I wondered how much of it we'd all missed before we'd started paying attention. Or maybe… Riley had simply become very good at hiding it.
The house was unusually quiet when I got home that evening. Connor sat at the dining table surrounded by textbooks, highlighters and enough loose pages to wallpaper the kitchen. Tyler stood at the stove stirring a pot of
