The fifty thousand landed in the account my computer teacher had helped set up two days later, an amount of money so far past anything I'd made selling chocolate that I sat and stared at the number for a full minute before I could make myself believe it belonged to me. I didn't touch it yet. Money like that needed a plan before it needed spending, and I'd learned enough from six months of second chances to know that the fastest way to lose an advantage was to celebrate it too loudly.
What I did instead, that Friday, was something smaller and stranger: I took the whole day off from being Jester, and spent it being nobody but Damian.
Annabelle texted first, mid-morning, a photo of a half-finished painting with no caption at all, which was somehow more her than any caption could have been — she talked in fragments and expected you to fill in the rest, the way she always had, in both lives, though only one of us remembered that this was the second time she'd done it.
[looks amazing. what's it gonna be]
[no idea yet lol. that's the fun part]
We ended up at the same park bench from the day I'd first recognized her, an accident of geography neither of us commented on, and talked for two hours about nothing that mattered and everything that did.
"I think it's going to be a door," she said, tilting the canvas so I could see the half-finished shape better. "Like, a door standing on its own in a field. No walls around it. You could just walk around it if you wanted."
"Why a door with no walls?"
"Because that's what most doors actually are, if you think about it. We just pretend they need walls to matter." She glanced sideways at me, testing whether I'd laugh at that, and I didn't, because it was exactly the kind of thing the version of her I used to know would have said at three in the morning, half-serious, half-daring me to argue.
"That's a very deep thing to say about a painting of a door."
"I contain multitudes," she said, deadpan, and went back to mixing paint.
I watched her work for a while without saying anything, the brush moving in small, sure strokes across a canvas she clearly wasn't rushing, and felt the specific vertigo of recognizing a gesture — the way she tilted her head to check an angle, the way she chewed the inside of her cheek when a color didn't come out right the first time — that belonged to a person who had spent an entire other lifetime becoming exactly who she already was at fourteen. It should have comforted me, that continuity. Mostly it just made the loss feel closer, like something that had happened yesterday instead of seventeen years and one entire death ago.
"You're doing the staring thing again," she said, without looking up from the canvas.
"Sorry. You're just really good at that. The painting."
"Flattery," she said, but she was smiling, and for a moment I let myself just sit in the ordinary warmth of an afternoon that had nothing to do with warehouses or masks or a wall behind a stranger's eyes.
"You should paint something for me sometime," I said, half-joking, mostly not.
"Yeah? What would you want?"
I thought about it longer than the question probably deserved. A door with no walls around it, maybe. A throne on a mountain that wasn't rock. A man in a suit with his fingers poised to snap. None of it was anything I could actually ask her to paint without a conversation neither of us was ready for.
"Surprise me," I said instead, and she laughed, and went back to her brush, and I let the moment be exactly as simple as she thought it was.
There's a specific ache to sitting across from someone who used to know every version of you and now knows none of them, who laughs at a joke you made because it's funny to her for the first time instead of the fortieth, who has no idea that the last time you held her hand it was across a hospital gurney instead of a park bench. I asked her, carefully, halfway through the second hour, whether she'd ever lost anyone close to her, and watched her think about it seriously before she answered.
"Not really. My grandma, but I was little. Why?"
"No reason. Just wondering what you write about, for the tragic stuff."
"Oh, that's easy. I make it up. I think that's actually easier than writing something real — you get to control exactly how much it hurts." She looked at me a beat too long after saying it, like she'd surprised herself with how true it sounded out loud. "You always get this look," she added, out of nowhere, watching me instead of the painting she'd brought to work on. "Like you're somewhere else. Where do you go?"
Somewhere you used to live.
"Nowhere interesting," I said instead. "Just thinking about work stuff."
"The mysterious business empire," she said, deadpan, and I laughed for real, because it was funnier from this angle than she knew. I didn't tell her any of it — not the door with no walls comment landing somewhere I hadn't expected, not the fact that I'd once planned an entire future around the shape of her laugh. There was a version of honesty that helped people and a version that only helped the person telling it, unburdening themselves onto someone who hadn't asked to carry it, and I'd decided somewhere around the third time I saw her face that this particular truth belonged firmly in the second category.
Emma called that evening, right as I was walking home, and I answered without breaking stride.
"You've been MIA all day," she said, not quite an accusation, close enough to one that I clocked it.
"Hung out with a friend. You know the drill."
"The art one?"
"Annabelle. Yeah."
A pause, short, the kind that told me exactly as much as a longer one would have. "Cool," she said, in the specific tone people use when a thing is the opposite of cool and they've decided not to say so directly. "You should bring her around sometime. I wanna meet the mystery girl you keep disappearing to see."
Absolutely not, I thought, with more force than the moment strictly called for, and covered it with something lighter. "Maybe. She's kind of a private person."
"Sure," Emma said, and let it go, though I could hear, underneath the easy tone, something that hadn't been there a week ago — a small, careful edge, the sound of someone deciding not to push a door they'd already noticed was locked. "Anyway. You free this weekend? My mom wants to meet you finally. She's convinced I made you up."
"Tell her I'm very real and very charming."
"She'll find out for herself. Saturday?"
"Saturday," I agreed, and we talked another ten minutes about nothing, and I let myself feel, for the length of one long exhale after I hung up, exactly how much I was juggling — Annabelle, who didn't know what she was to me; Emma, who was starting to suspect there was something to be jealous of and didn't yet know how right she was; Doug and Yankovic and fifty thousand dollars and a warehouse full of men who called me god; a porcelain mask in a box in my closet that had, four days ago, hit a wall behind a stranger's eyes and come away rattled — and thought, not without a certain dark amusement, that the throne in my nightmares was starting to look less like a fantasy and more like an inevitability, one careless day at a time.
I got home a little after seven to find my mom in the kitchen and my dad at the table, and something in the set of both their shoulders told me, before either of them said a word, that this wasn't going to be an ordinary dinner.
"Sit down, Damian," my dad said, not unkindly, but with a weight behind it I hadn't heard in months.
I sat.
"We're not trying to pry," my mom started, hands still moving over a pot she wasn't really watching anymore. "But your father found something in your jacket pocket doing laundry. A business card. For a bank we've never heard of."
My stomach went very cold, very fast, running the math on exactly which jacket, which card, which piece of the last six months had finally slipped through a gap I hadn't checked carefully enough.
"We're not accusing you of anything," my dad said, and I could hear, underneath the careful, measured tone, a real and specific fear — not of me, exactly, but for me, the particular fear of a parent who has done the math on what fifty thousand dollars of unexplained money usually means for a fourteen-year-old and doesn't like a single answer the math produces. "But you need to understand how this looks from where we're standing. Drugs. Something worse. We've been telling ourselves it's chocolate and hustle for months because we wanted to believe it, and we're not able to keep believing it tonight."
I looked at the two of them — really looked, the way I hadn't let myself in weeks, too busy being Jester and Somnus and whatever Damian needed to be for Emma and whatever Damian needed to be for Annabelle to spend much time being the actual, uncomplicated son they still, somehow, against every piece of evidence accumulating in my jacket pockets, wanted to believe in.
I thought about the throne. About strings running down from my fingers into people I loved. About Mr. Ashford's voice, unhurried, telling me a wall exists somewhere for everyone, even me, even here, even now.
And I made eye contact with both of them at once, the way I hadn't done since that night in the living room months ago, and felt the familiar cold drop in my stomach that came every single time I did this to the two people who'd never once, in either of my lives, given me a real reason to.
"It's an investment account," I said, voice steady, eyes locked, the purple flicker catching in both their gazes at once. "For a business venture with an older mentor. It's completely legitimate, and it's not something you need to worry about anymore."
I watched the tension drain out of both their shoulders at once, watched my mother's hand still finally over the pot, watched my father's jaw unclench by degrees, and felt, underneath the relief of a threat successfully managed, the same small, familiar rot I felt every single time I did this — a little more of myself sanded away, a little more distance put between the boy who used to hate himself for it and the boy sitting at this table now, who mostly just felt tired.
"That's good, honey," my mom said, already turning back to the stove, already forgetting there had been anything to worry about at all. "We just want you safe."
"I know," I said. "I am."
It wasn't a lie, exactly. I genuinely didn't know anymore whether that made it better or worse.
Dinner finished the way it always did after a moment like that — plates cleared, a show neither of us was really watching playing low in the background, my dad falling half-asleep in his chair by nine the way he always did after a long shift. I sat with them a while longer than I needed to, not because the danger had passed but because some part of me wanted, badly, to hold onto the ordinary shape of an evening like this for as long as it would let me. My mom hummed along to a commercial jingle without noticing she was doing it. My dad's breathing evened out into something close to a snore. And I sat between them on a couch in an apartment my second-chance money could have replaced ten times over, and thought, not for the first time, that there were entire categories of thing I'd never be able to buy back no matter how large the number in that account eventually grew.