Chapter 98: Mandi’s Breaking Point

POV: Georgia

I come back to the dorm after a physical therapy session, my leg aching, my mind still tangled up in Liam’s silence from that morning, and I find Mandi sitting cross-legged on her bed with her phone pressed to her ear. The curtains are half drawn, striping the room in gold and shadow, and the air smells like her vanilla candle burned down to nothing. She looks up when the door opens, and I see it immediately: the tight line of her shoulders, the way her free hand grips her own knee hard enough to whiten her knuckles.

"Hold on," she says, her voice clipped and strained, glancing at me before tilting the phone away from her mouth. "Can you give me a minute?"

"I can go," I say, already backing toward the door, my bag strap slipping off my shoulder.

"No. It’s fine. Stay," she says, firm despite the way her hand trembles against the phone case.

I don’t understand at first why she wants me here for this. I set my bag down slowly, careful not to make noise, the zipper catching slightly, and I sit on the edge of my own bed. The mattress creaks under me. I watch her because I don’t know what else to do, my eyes tracing the stiff angle of her spine. That strange, formal letter she got weeks ago flashes through my mind, the one she never fully explained, the one that left her jumpy for days. I wonder if this call is its sequel.

"I’m still here," she says into the phone, her voice gone thin and papery. "No, I understand. I understand what you’re saying," she says, flat, like she’s reciting someone else’s script. A pause stretches long enough that I hear the hum of the dorm’s old radiator kick on. Her eyes close. "An asset freeze means what, exactly. In plain terms," she asks, her tone sharpening into something brittle.

I don’t know what an asset freeze is, but the way she says it, the way her voice cracks around the edges, tells me it’s not a late payment or a paperwork mistake. It’s something that can take everything.

Whoever is on the other end says something long. I can hear the tinny drone of a voice through the speaker, too distorted to make out words. Mandi’s face goes through several things while she listens: confusion first, her brow furrowing, then something sharper, something closer to panic, her lips parting like she’s forgotten how to breathe evenly.

"That’s not possible," she says, her voice rising, cracking at the edges. "That account has been in my family for three generations. You can’t just, there has to be a process, there has to be - " she says, cutting herself off, her free hand flying up to press against her forehead.

Another pause. Longer this time. I watch her jaw tighten, a muscle jumping there like something trapped under her skin.

"An investigation," she repeats, her voice cracking slightly on the word, the sound small and splintered. "Into what, exactly. Into who," she asks, barely above a whisper now.

I don’t know what the voice on the other end says, but whatever it is, it takes the last bit of color out of her face. She goes still in a way that scares me more than the panic did, a kind of stillness that looks like shock settling in underneath everything else, like something inside her has quietly switched off.

"Okay," she says, very quietly, her voice stripped of all its usual brightness. "Okay. I understand. Thank you for telling me," she says, hollow, mechanical, the words coming out like they belong to someone else.

She lowers the phone from her ear slowly, like it weighs more than it should, and sets it face down on the comforter beside her. The screen taps softly against the fabric. She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t look at me. Her hands fall into her lap, empty and open, like she doesn’t know what to do with them anymore.

"Mandi?" I ask, careful, testing the air between us.

She doesn’t answer.

Her shoulders start to shake, small at first, like a current running just under her skin, and then harder. She slides off the edge of the bed and onto the floor, her back hitting the bed frame with a soft thud, her knees pulling up to her chest. She folds into herself and goes still, except for the tremor she can’t control.

I’ve never seen Mandi like this. Not once, not in all these months. I’ve seen her loud, voice ringing off the dorm walls. I’ve seen her scared, eyes darting toward doors like she expected something to come through them. I’ve seen her trying desperately to cover both of those things with a joke or a sudden change of subject, a flick of her hair, a roll of her eyes. I’ve never seen her just stop trying to hide anything at all.

I get up and cross the room, my bad leg protesting with a dull throb, and sit down on the floor beside her. The carpet is rough under my palms. I don’t say anything. I don’t know what there is to say. I just sit close enough that our shoulders almost touch, and I wait, my breath slow and even, trying to steady the room just by being still in it.

She cries quietly. Not the loud, heaving kind of crying. Just a slow, steady leak of something she’s clearly been holding back for a very long time, tears sliding down her face one after another while she stares at nothing, her arms wrapped tight around her own knees, her knuckles pale against her own skin.

I don’t ask what the call was about. I don’t ask what asset freeze means, or what investigation means, or why a family that’s been at Rosethorne forever is suddenly being looked at by lawyers with letterhead formal enough to shake Mandi’s hands for days after she first got one. I just stay there, my shoulder almost touching hers, and I let the silence be whatever she needs it to be. Somewhere beneath the quiet, I think about Liam, about secrets that seem to multiply the longer I stay in this place, but I push the thought down and leave it there.

Minutes pass. The light outside the window shifts slightly, the late afternoon sun sliding lower behind the trees, turning the sky the color of a healing bruise. Somewhere down the hall, a door opens and closes, someone’s laughter drifting past and fading again, bright and careless and completely unaware. Neither of us moves.

Finally, Mandi’s crying slows. She wipes at her face with the back of her hand, a messy, childlike gesture that doesn’t match how put-together she usually is, smearing a dark line of mascara toward her temple, and she takes a long, shuddering breath.

"I’m so sorry," she whispers, her voice raw and barely there. I have to lean in to catch it, the scent of her burned-out candle still clinging to the air between us.

I don’t know what she’s apologizing for. The phone call, the letter from weeks ago, or something bigger than both of those things entirely, something that ties back to every strange thing I’ve written in my notebook since the day I arrived, every late night, every whispered name I wasn’t supposed to hear.

I don’t ask. Not yet. I just sit with her on the floor, our shoulders touching now, and I wait for whatever comes next.