Chapter 2 The Invasion

Avery's POV

My mother told me about the live-in arrangement at seven in the morning, still in her work uniform, coffee going cold in her hands.

"It's temporary," she said. "Three months, maybe four. They need someone on site during the renovation and they're offering housing as part of the package."

I stared at her. "You want us to move into their house."

"I want us to stop being two months behind on rent." She set the mug down. "Avery. I need you to hear me on this."

I heard her. I just didn't say anything back.

We packed that Saturday. Two suitcases each. My laptop, my hard drive, the box of coding books I had carried through four different apartments. My mother moved through the duplex with the quiet efficiency of someone who had already made the decision and didn't have room left to second guess it. She folded things neatly. Taped boxes with the same steady hands she used for everything.

I packed fast because looking at the room too long made it worse.

The Ryder estate sat behind iron gates that opened automatically when we pulled up, and from the passenger seat I looked at it through the windshield and understood for the first time what the word estate actually meant. Three stories. Stone facade. Ivy on the east wall. A fountain running in the circular driveway in October for no reason except that they could afford to run it. My mother parked next to a Land Rover that cost more than everything we owned combined and sat there for a second with both hands still on the wheel.

"Heads up," she said quietly. "Smile. Be polite."

"I'm always polite."

She gave me the look that meant she remembered the filler comment.

Mrs. Ryder met us at the door herself, which I hadn't expected. She was tall and warm with Jaxon's gray eyes and a handshake that felt like she actually meant it, and she took my mother's coat and said she was glad we were here and meant that too. She led us through a hallway bigger than our living room, past a staircase with an iron banister, down toward the east wing.

My mother's room had a garden view and a private bathroom and more space than either of our last two places combined. Her face did something she tried to hide when Mrs. Ryder showed her the closet.

I looked away and let her have that moment.

My room was next door. Clean lines, quiet, a wide desk under the window like it had been waiting. Mrs. Ryder mentioned the wifi was fast because her son used a lot of bandwidth for film editing.

I set my laptop bag on the desk and told myself this was fine.

"Jaxon should be back from practice around six." Mrs. Ryder paused in the doorway. "I'd love for us all to have dinner together tonight."

She said it like it was the simplest thing. Then she was gone and the room was quiet and I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall.

Dinner. With Jaxon Ryder. In his house, where I now lived, forty eight hours after he watched Madison dismantle me in front of half the senior class and told me it wasn't about me.

I opened my laptop and worked until six.

I heard him before I saw him, footsteps heavy on the stairs, a door somewhere down the hall, his voice below asking his mother something I couldn't make out. I closed my laptop and went downstairs because hiding on the first night would only make every morning after worse.

He was already in the kitchen. Practice clothes, hair still damp, scrolling his phone with one hand and reaching into the fridge with the other. He looked up when I walked in.

"You actually moved in."

"Apparently."

He looked back at his phone. "I thought my mother was joking."

"She wasn't."

My mother was already at the stove with Mrs. Ryder, the two of them talking easily, laughing about something I had missed. Comfortable in a way that made something in my chest go sideways. I pulled out a stool at the island and sat down.

Jaxon set his phone face down on the counter.

"You're in the east wing."

"Yes."

"My gym is in the east wing."

"I'll stay out of your gym."

"I'm up at five."

"I'm up at four thirty." I opened my laptop. "So we're fine."

He didn't answer. Dinner was set, we sat down, Mrs. Ryder carried the conversation, my mother filled the gaps, and Jaxon moved food around his plate and looked at the table. I kept my eyes on my own side and ate and said nothing that wasn't directly asked of me.

Afterward I went back upstairs and got through half a problem set before my phone lit up with a notification from an account I didn't recognize.

The profile picture was a still from the party video. My face, red and cornered, blown up into a circle avatar. The username was @avengeAveryBennett and it already had four hundred followers. Someone was running a support page, using my worst moment as content, pulling in strangers who wanted to feel something about a girl they had never met. The comments were defenders and bullies and people debating my body like I wasn't a person attached to it.

I closed the app and sat in the quiet.

Down the hall, Jaxon's door clicked shut.

Twenty feet from the boy who had called me an inconvenience. In a house I didn't belong in. With a viral video still collecting views and now a whole page of strangers turning my humiliation into something they could follow.

I put my headphones on and went back to work.

It was the only thing I actually knew how to control.

In the morning the house was already moving by the time I came downstairs at four thirty, my mother in the kitchen with Mrs. Ryder going over the day's schedule, the two of them talking in the easy practical way of people who have already figured out how to work together. I got coffee, got my bag, and stood by the front door.

Jaxon came down at six fifty with his backpack over one shoulder and his keys in his hand and looked at me standing there and said nothing. I said nothing back. We stood in the same expensive hallway, two people with nothing in common except an address, and waited for the car.

The gates opened when we pulled out. The duplex was twenty minutes away in the other direction, behind us now, behind the iron gates and the fountain and everything else that made this feel like something I was visiting rather than something I was living.

I looked out the window and told myself it was temporary.

My mother had said three months, maybe four.

I was going to hold her to that.