No one really left you out.

They included you, in their own way.

A cigarette pressed into your hand even if you didn’t ask for it. Party invites you weren’t sure you wanted to accept. “Come with us” whenever someone had to fix the mess they’d made somewhere around Bristol. Not because they trusted you completely, but because you were… there. Steady. Calm.

Freddie couldn’t understand how Effy had ended up friends with someone like you. He never asked. He rarely did. It was easier to watch from a distance, to make his own assumptions and keep them to himself.

There was something about you that didn’t match the rest of them.

If they were chaos, you were the thing that sometimes kept everything from falling apart. When something went wrong —which was most of the time— someone would say your name. Not because you had all the answers. You just seemed to know what to do. Or at least what not to do.

That confused him.

You’d never exchanged more than a couple of words. Just brief glances, quick looks when something bad happened and everyone searched for whoever might help. Freddie didn’t understand why you were like that. Why you seemed so… put together among people who were falling apart. Sometimes he even felt like he couldn’t trust you.

In a group where most of them were broken, why was there room for someone who only seemed to have cracks?

To him, your calm couldn’t be real. It had to be a mask, something that would break sooner or later.

The party wasn’t your idea. You just offered the house. A weekend without adults. You didn’t mind, you’d never been good at throwing parties, so letting someone else take over made it easier.

You didn’t know when your living room turned into a sea of bodies. Music too loud. Laughter that didn’t mean much. Drinks spilling onto the floor. There was barely space to move.

You ended up in the backyard without really knowing how. The air outside was colder, cleaner. Inside, everyone else was doing stupid things they wouldn’t regret as long as someone watched them for a moment —yelling, shoving, someone climbing onto a makeshift table, laughter a little too loud.

You just watched.

Freddie appeared beside you like he’d always been there. He didn’t make a sound. He never did. He held out a half-filled plastic cup without really looking at you, like it was an automatic gesture.

You shook your head.

“I’m okay.”

He shrugged and drank it himself, all at once, pulling a slight face afterward. He stayed. Next to you. Not too close, not walking away, just like he was testing how real it felt to share the space.

It was strange.

He wanted to know more about you. Not urgently, not desperately —just understand you. But he didn’t know how. Everyone else seemed to know exactly what to say to make you look at them, to make you react. With him, even finding a sentence that didn’t feel wrong seemed complicated.

He looked out at the yard, at the mess slowly swallowing your house.

“Your place is going to end up in ruins” he joked, barely smiling.

He didn’t dare look at you yet.

He didn’t know if he wanted you to look first, wasn’t sure it mattered. He was just there now, and somehow, there was no going back.