Chapter 98: Anonymous

By lunchtime, nearly everyone at Moonstone Academy had heard about the student radio advice segment, news traveling faster than any official announcement ever managed to. Liam had decorated the radio room with a handwritten sign reading Love, Life, and Other Disasters, and Jace had appointed himself the unofficial producer, despite having no broadcasting experience whatsoever and even less patience for following instructions.

Roxanne walked into the cafeteria with Isla and Tessa, trays balanced carefully, where a small crowd was already arguing loudly about what kinds of questions ought to get submitted. Tessa predicted the whole segment would be a complete disaster within a week. Isla, more optimistic, believed students would mostly use it to confess crushes anonymously. Roxanne said both predictions were probably correct, and the table laughed.

Then someone asked whether Roxanne planned to submit a question herself. She refused immediately. Tessa grinned at her. "You have four potential subjects," she said. "I have four potential reasons to throw you out a window," Roxanne said, and the conversation dissolved into laughter. Underneath the joke, though, she found herself thinking about a complicated situation she had never actually discussed with anyone out loud, not even Isla, who usually knew everything.

That afternoon, Roxanne, Isla, and Tessa squeezed onto one sofa in the common room to listen to the first broadcast. Liam turned out to be surprisingly good at hosting, funny without turning every single answer into a joke. When a nervous student asked how to apologize to a friend properly, he gave genuinely thoughtful advice about taking responsibility instead of making excuses.

Jace kept interrupting with terrible suggestions, forcing Liam to threaten removing him from the room more than once.

One submission, read aloud midway through, asked how someone could tell another person they liked them when they were afraid of being laughed at. Liam paused before answering. "Start by deciding whether you trust them enough to hear the truth," he said. "You can’t control what they feel, but you can choose someone who won’t make you regret being honest." Roxanne looked up from her book, surprised by how sincere the answer sounded coming from him. Isla noticed her expression but said nothing.

Near the end of the broadcast, Liam opened a final envelope. The handwriting on the submission was anonymous, and the question read aloud across the airwaves made the whole room go quiet. What if you like someone who seems to like you back, but you know they might never choose you because there are other people involved? Should you keep trying, or walk away before you get hurt?

Jace stopped joking entirely. Liam read the question twice before answering carefully. "I don’t think anyone should have to compete for the right to be cared about," he said. "But I also don’t think you should walk away from something real just because you’re scared of how it might end. If you want someone, be honest with yourself about what you can handle."

He named no one, and made no kind of public confession, but Roxanne felt the question settle uncomfortably in her chest anyway. It sounded like something anyone with a complicated crush might ask, but it also touched the exact problem she had been carefully avoiding for weeks. She wondered, briefly, whether one of the brothers had submitted it, then reminded herself the academy was full of students with complicated feelings of their own. She had no actual evidence it concerned her at all.

Over the course of the afternoon, moving between classes and the library, she encountered each brother separately. Lucien asked whether she’d heard the broadcast, and when she mentioned the question, he said simply that people shouldn’t be expected to make promises before they understood what they actually wanted.

Roshan seemed more curious about the sender themselves, wondering aloud whether they’d wanted advice or simply permission to stop waiting. Liam insisted his answer had been excellent and refused outright to speculate about who had sent it, waving the question away like a bothersome fly.

Kai said very little when she brought it up, only asking whether the question had made her uncomfortable. She admitted that it had. "Because you know someone like that?" he asked. "Because I understand how they might feel," she said. Kai accepted that answer without pressing for more.

None of the conversations turned into a confession, and Roxanne didn’t spend her afternoon weighing which brother might make the best partner, though the thought hovered at the edges more than once. The question simply forced her to recognize that her own uncertainty could eventually affect people she genuinely cared about.

That evening, while they were supposed to be studying, Isla told her that students were already trying to identify the anonymous sender. Some guessed it was a first-year with an unrequited crush, others assumed it was someone pining after a senior from a different pack entirely. Tessa’s theory changed every few minutes, each one more elaborate and less believable than the last. Roxanne told them firmly to leave the person alone, since whoever had submitted it clearly wanted advice without having to reveal who they were to the entire academy.

Later, walking back from the library with her bag heavy on her shoulder, she overheard two students discussing the question in the corridor, one of them claiming the sender was a girl interested in a boy from a prominent pack family. Roxanne assumed at first they meant someone entirely unrelated to her. Then one of them mentioned the Moonstones by name, and she stopped walking.

The two students moved on quickly, still deep in their theorizing, oblivious to her standing there, and she didn’t confront them. She had no proof the submission had anything to do with her or any of the brothers, and she refused to let another rumor dictate how she carried herself for the rest of the evening. Still, the possibility followed her all the way back to her dormitory, settling somewhere in her chest she couldn’t quite shake loose.

Before bed, propped up against her pillows, Roxanne opened the student radio submission page on her phone and sat staring at the blank entry box for a long moment. She considered writing something, then hesitated. She didn’t want to ask which brother she should choose, since that would reduce four separate, genuine relationships into a simple ranking, and she wasn’t ready to make any decision simply because other people expected one from her.

Instead, after deleting three different half-finished sentences, she typed something else entirely. How do you know when you’re ready to trust someone again after you’ve been hurt? She stared at the question for a long moment, her thumb hovering over the submit button, before finally submitting it anonymously. It wasn’t a request for permission to fall in love with anyone at all. It was a question she had genuinely never answered for herself, not once, not even privately.

The confirmation appeared on her screen a moment later, small and unremarkable. Submission received. Roxanne closed the page and set her phone on the nightstand, feeling strangely lighter for having finally written it down somewhere at all, even anonymously, even if no one would ever know it came from her.

The following morning, still tangled in her blankets, a message from Liam arrived while she was barely half awake. Did you submit something to the advice segment? Roxanne sat straight up in bed, her heart suddenly pounding. She hadn’t told a single person at all, not even Isla. Before she could even type a response, another message appeared on her screen, lighting up the dark room. Don’t panic. I haven’t read the new submissions yet. But someone asked me yesterday whether I could keep a sender’s identity private, even from my friends.

Roxanne stared at the screen for a long moment, her thumb hovering uselessly over the keyboard, her pulse ticking a little faster than it should have, wondering whether Liam actually knew more than he was letting on, or whether someone else entirely had already started treating the radio segment as a quiet way to reach her.