Chapter 1 The Number Above His Head

Cael POV

The first thing I do in a new house is count the exits.

Front door. Back door through the kitchen. Side window in the hallway that drops close enough to the ground that a person could land without breaking anything. Three ways out. I memorize them the way other kids memorize locker combinations. Automatic. Necessary.

I've been doing it since I was eleven, since the night I stood at my family's dinner table and watched the numbers above my parents' heads tick down to zero and didn't understand what it meant until the police showed up four days later.

I understand now.

The Daltry house is big and clean and smells like money and something I can't name. My mom's new husband, Silas, paid for movers. I told her I'd carry my own bag. It's a duffel. Everything I own fits in one duffel. She looked at me like that broke her heart a little, and I looked at the floor so I wouldn't see the number above her head, because I already know it and I'm not ready to think about it today.

Dinner is at seven.

I plan to eat fast and disappear upstairs.

That plan dies the second I walk into the dining room, and Silas is already standing at the head of the table with a glass raised, smiling the way men smile in photographs. My mom is beside him, her hand on his arm, her eyes finding mine with that quiet, desperate hope she's been wearing for six months. Please try. Please be okay. Please let this work.

I sit down. I keep my eyes on my plate.

"To new beginnings," Silas says.

I lift my glass. I look up to find my mom's face so she knows I'm trying.

And then I see him.

Rowe Daltry is sitting directly across from me. Dark hair, jaw set, shoulders back, the kind of still that isn't calm, it's controlled. He's watching me the way you watch something you haven't decided what to do with yet. Seventeen years of keeping my eyes down, and I pick this exact second to forget.

I look at him.

The number appears above his head, the way it always does, white, sharp, impossible to unsee.

87.

Eighty-seven days.

The glass slips. Water hits the table in a cold wave, spreading fast across the white cloth, and everyone moves at once, my mom grabbing napkins, Silas waving it off with a laugh that doesn't reach his eyes, a housekeeper appearing from nowhere. I'm not moving. I'm sitting completely still with my hands in my lap and my stomach somewhere on the floor because eighty-seven days is nothing. Eighty-seven days is the end of October. Eighty-seven days means the boy sitting across from me, eating dinner like it's a normal Sunday, will be dead before the first snow falls.

"It's fine," Silas says warmly. "Cael, no harm done."

I nod. I don't trust my voice.

Rowe hasn't looked away from me once. He watched the glass fall, and he watched me not react to the mess, and now he's looking at me like he's already figured out that something is wrong; he just doesn't know what yet. His expression doesn't change. Not annoyed. Not amused. Just reading me. Cataloguing.

I look back at my plate.

Dinner takes forty minutes. I count every one of them. My mom talks too much because she does that when she's nervous, filling the silence like it's a threat. Silas asks Rowe about school. Rowe answers in three words or fewer each time, polite and flat and completely closed. Nobody asks me anything until dessert, when Silas turns to me with that photograph smile and says, "We're glad you're here, Cael. This is your home now."

I say thank you.

Rowe's chair scrapes back. "Excuse me." He picks up his plate, carries it to the kitchen himself, like the housekeeper doesn't exist, and walks upstairs without looking at anyone.

My mom watches him go and then looks at me with an apology in her eyes. I shake my head slightly. Don't. I don't need him to be friendly. I don't need anything from Rowe Daltry except to stay out of his way for eighty-seven days until

Until.

I go upstairs ten minutes later. My room is the second door on the left. Rowe's is at the end of the hall. The light under his door is on. I walk past it fast and close myself in and sit on the edge of the bed in the dark and press the heels of my hands against my eyes.

Eighty-seven days.

I've seen numbers before. Too many. I know what they mean, and I know there is nothing I have ever been able to do about them. I saw my dad's. I saw my mom's the first one, the real one, and I buried that number so deep I can't breathe when it surfaces. I have spent three years learning that knowing doesn't mean saving. Knowing just means carrying it alone until the day it stops being a countdown and starts being a funeral.

I'm not doing that again.

I pull out my notebook, and I write it down. Not the number. The plan. The exit timeline I've been building for six months, the forged documents, the saved money, the contact two towns over who doesn't ask questions. I have had enough. I could leave before the school year even starts. I could be gone before any of this becomes something I have to survive.

I'm still staring at the page when something slides under my door.

A piece of paper. Folded once.

I don't move for a full ten seconds. Then I cross the room and pick it up.

Four words. Handwriting that's sharp and certain and doesn't waste anything.

Stay out of my way.

I look at the gap under the door. I look at the words. I think about the number above the head of the boy who wrote them, and I think about the last time I knew someone's number and told myself it wasn't my problem.

I didn't sleep for a year after that.

I fold the note carefully and set it on the nightstand.

Then I sit back down on the bed and start doing the math I swore I would never do again.

Because here's the thing about eighty-seven days.

Rowe Daltry doesn't know he's dying.

And I just moved into his house.