Chapter 102: Two Circles

POV: Georgia

I drew two circles on a fresh page and watched them collapse into one.

It starts as a simple idea. I’m still sitting up in bed with the notebook on my lap, and the sentence I just wrote is staring back at me. *He’s been lying to me from the start.* My hand is still steady, and I don’t want to waste that, so I flip back through the pages to find the two columns I made weeks ago.

SABOTAGE is on the left. IMPOSSIBLE is on the right. I drew a line down the middle of the page, like they were two different problems that needed to stay in their own corners. The ink has gone slightly brown at the edges where I pressed too hard, like the page itself has been holding its breath along with me.

I read down the left side first. The blade mount. The equipment report. The technician whose number got disconnected. Bianca saying *It has to look like an accident* through a door I wasn’t supposed to be listening at. Darcy knowing a detail about the wear pattern that I never told him.

Then I read down the right side. Puck healing in two seconds. His skin burning hot. The gold in his eyes. The empty campus on full moon nights. The twins moving like water. Bella’s eyes flashing amber. Bianca’s hands curling like claws. The wolf in the clearing that flicked its ears when I said a name.

I’ve read these lists a hundred times. They always felt like two piles. This time I notice something I never did before, and my mouth goes dry, the kind of dry that makes you swallow twice before you can breathe right again.

The same names keep showing up on both sides.

I grab my pen and underline Darcy on the left. Then I flip my eyes over and find him on the right. *You smell like him already.* The way his smile stopped before it reached his eyes. The hunger I saw when I mentioned the twins. He’s in both columns. I knew that already. I circled him three times a long time ago, hard enough that the paper puckered.

But I never checked anyone else.

I do it now, slowly, one name at a time, like I’m grading a test I’m terrified to fail. Bella is on the left because she flinched when I mentioned the equipment report. She’s on the right because her eyes changed color right in front of me. Bianca is on the left for the whispered plan. She’s on the right for the claws and the sharp teeth. Puck is on the right for everything. But then I stop, and my pen hovers over the left side.

*Is Puck on the left?*

I make myself think about it. He was on his feet before I hit the ice. He looked at me in the hospital like the fall was his fault. And when I told him I thought someone had done this to me, he didn’t look surprised. He looked like someone who already knew.

He wasn’t the one who hurt me. I’m sure of that now, in a way I can’t explain. But he’s tangled up in it. He’s in both columns too.

I keep going. Liam. Mandi. Alexa, frozen at the howl. The coach who told me to guard my skates. The PR firm smoothing over things that shouldn’t need smoothing. Every single person I’ve been suspicious of.

They’re all on the right side. And now I’m finding almost all of them on the left.

My pen starts moving faster, scratching hard enough that I can feel the grooves through the next three pages. I turn to a clean sheet and press the tip down in the center. I draw one circle and label it SABOTAGE. Then I draw a second one that overlaps it, and I label that one IMPOSSIBLE.

I mean for the circles to cross in the middle, just a little. A small lens-shaped space where a few names can sit. That’s how this kind of diagram is supposed to work. Some things belong to one side, some things belong to the other, and a handful belong to both.

I start copying names into the places they go.

I get four names in and I can’t stop. I write Darcy in the middle. I write Bella and Bianca next to him. I write Puck. I write Liam and Mandi and Alexa, and I keep having to erase the labels on the outer parts of the circles, my eraser leaving gray smudges like bruises on the paper, because every name I try to put in the left-only section belongs in the right-only section too. Then I realize there isn’t a left-only section at all. There never was.

I stare at the page. The two circles I drew are sitting almost on top of each other now, because I kept scribbling them wider to make room. They aren’t overlapping a little. They’re overlapping so much that the edges barely show.

I sit there for a long time with my pen in my hand, the cap loose between two fingers, clicking it open and shut without meaning to.

Then I do something I haven’t done since I started this notebook. I get a clean sheet of tracing paper from the back of my sketchbook, the kind I use for drawing skating diagrams, and lay it over the page. I trace the first circle - SABOTAGE - my hand slow and deliberate. Then I slide the paper across to the second circle and trace IMPOSSIBLE right on top of the first one.

When I lift the tracing paper and hold it up to the window, the two circles sit perfectly on top of each other. One shape. One story.

I let out a breath, and it shakes a little on the way out, a thin, rattling sound that doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. The sabotage and the impossible things were never two separate mysteries. Someone broke my skate because of what they are. The people who did it are the same people who heal in two seconds and glow gold in the dark. Whatever happened to me at the Classic wasn’t a normal crime that took place at a strange school. It was one story the whole time, and I’ve been reading it in two halves.

Mandi shifts in her sleep and mumbles something about seating charts, her voice thick and unbothered. I almost laugh, and it comes out as a tiny, cracked sound, more air than noise. I clap my hand over my mouth and wait, still as the wolf in the clearing, until she goes quiet again.

The window beside me has gone from black to a deep, dusty blue. It must be close to five. The first thin line of gray is creeping up behind the trees, and for the first time all night I notice how tired I am. My eyes feel sandy, my lids heavy in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. My knee throbs in time with my pulse, a slow metronome keeping count of everything I’ve just figured out.

But I’m not finished.

I look down at the circles again, at the place in the middle where the two edges blur together. There’s a small, empty space left in the very center, right where all my arrows end up pointing. It’s smaller than a coin. It’s like the page is leaving me room on purpose, like it’s been waiting this whole time for me to fill it in.

I know what goes there. I’ve known for weeks. I’ve written the word on the margins of other pages and scratched it out every single time, the pen digging deep enough to tear the paper, the way you scratch out a phone number you aren’t brave enough to call.

My hand hovers over the paper, fingers tight around the pen.

I think about the wolf in the clearing and how it looked at me like it knew me, amber eyes steady and unblinking. I think about the hair caught in my sleeve that was warm when it shouldn’t have been. I think about a boy’s hand closing around my arm on the cobblestones, burning hot, shaking when he walked away like he was holding something back by force. I think about Liam saying *you’re not wrong,* even though he hasn’t said it yet, and I just know he will, know it the same way I know the sun is about to come up behind those trees.

I’m tired of being scared of a word.

I press the pen to the paper, right in the tiny space where the two circles meet, and write it in small, careful letters.

*Werewolf.*

I look at it. I wait for the urge to cross it out. It doesn’t come.

I never will again.