Chapter 99: Not Your Secret

Chapter 99 — Not Your Secret

Roxanne found Liam outside the cafeteria the next morning, arms crossed, and demanded to know why he’d messaged her about anonymous submissions in the first place. He explained that a student had approached him right after the broadcast, worried that someone might recognize their handwriting on the submission. Liam had promised not to reveal their identity, even if his own friends asked him directly. He hadn’t even gotten around to reading Roxanne’s new submission yet.

"Then why message me?" she asked. "Because you looked like you wanted to ask me something yesterday," he said, "and I wondered if you were worried about privacy." "That’s a remarkably sensible explanation," she said. "Who are you, and what have you done with Liam Moonstone?" He laughed, but his expression turned serious again almost immediately.

The student who’d approached him, he explained, wasn’t asking for romantic advice anymore. They were afraid a personal matter would become public gossip instead. Liam didn’t tell her the student’s name, and she made a point of not asking for it either. Instead she asked what the student actually needed from all this. "Someone to stop treating their private life like entertainment," Liam said.

By lunchtime, students across the academy were already speculating wildly about the anonymous question from the previous broadcast, the theories growing stranger with every passing hour. Some thought it concerned a secret relationship, while others insisted it had to be about someone trying to steal a boyfriend already claimed by somebody else. The details grew more exaggerated with every retelling.

Roxanne overheard a cluster of students discussing it near the cafeteria entrance, one of them suggesting loudly that the sender was trying to steal someone else’s boyfriend outright. She refused to join the conversation.

When a classmate turned and asked whether she knew anything about it, Roxanne answered flatly. "No," she said firmly. "And even if I did, it wouldn’t make the story yours to tell." The girl looked embarrassed and changed the subject quickly. Roxanne didn’t make a speech out of it or start a confrontation. She simply refused to help the rumor spread any further than it already had.

Later that day, between her last two classes, Liam asked Roxanne to meet him outside the radio room.

The student who had submitted the original question had agreed to speak with them directly. Her name was Mara, a quiet second-year girl who had been secretly dating another student for several months now. Their relationship wasn’t forbidden by any rule, but her boyfriend had remained reluctant to acknowledge it publicly, and Mara had submitted the question because she genuinely didn’t know whether she should keep waiting for him to grow comfortable with it.

The rumor accusing her of trying to steal someone else’s boyfriend, repeated endlessly by people who knew nothing about the situation, had only made everything worse. Mara made it clear she didn’t want Roxanne to solve her relationship for her. She simply wanted the gossip to stop entirely. Roxanne listened carefully and asked whether Mara had told her boyfriend how the whole situation made her feel.

Mara admitted she had tried more than once, but he kept asking for more time without ever explaining why. "Then you need to decide how much time you’re willing to give him," Roxanne said. "Not because people are gossiping about you. Because your feelings matter too." Liam stayed quiet throughout, letting Roxanne speak without turning the whole conversation into another installment of his own advice segment.

Mara’s boyfriend, Adrian, arrived a short while later, hair still damp from practice, after she messaged him to come. He looked defensive from the moment he walked in, clearly assuming they’d gathered to accuse him of treating her badly. Roxanne made it clear right away that she wasn’t there to judge their relationship at all.

Adrian explained, reluctantly and without much eye contact, that he hadn’t acknowledged Mara publicly because his family was strict about relationships during the school year, and he worried that if they found out, they’d interfere with his education and his plans for the future. Mara pointed out, not unkindly, that he could have simply explained that to her instead of leaving her to guess at his reasons for months.

The disagreement stayed uncomfortable without ever becoming explosive, the kind of tense quiet that filled a room rather than a shout. Roxanne asked Adrian a simple question, whether, if Mara were willing to keep their relationship private a while longer, he would still be able to treat her like his girlfriend whenever they were alone together. He couldn’t answer right away.

Mara realized, watching him struggle with it in real time, that the real issue wasn’t secrecy at all. It was that she had been carrying all the uncertainty alone while he made every decision that mattered. She told him, quietly but firmly, that she needed some space to figure out what she actually wanted. Adrian clearly didn’t like hearing that, but he agreed to give her the space anyway. Roxanne made no promise that the two of them would eventually reconcile. Their relationship, after all, belonged entirely to them.

After Mara left, the door clicking softly shut behind her, Liam thanked Roxanne for helping without ever demanding that she expose anyone’s identity. She pointed out that he’d done most of the real work himself, simply by quietly keeping his promise all along. "Don’t sound so surprised," he said. "I can be responsible." "Occasionally," she said dryly, and he grinned before turning thoughtful again. ℯⅇ𝙡.

He admitted that when he’d first started the radio segment, he’d expected it to be mostly entertaining, and he hadn’t considered how much courage it might take for someone to submit a question they couldn’t ask their own friends directly. 𝖋𝘳ℯ

Roxanne told him that people would probably keep listening if they believed he’d take their problems seriously instead of turning everything into a joke. Liam looked pleased by that, though he didn’t turn the moment into another one. "Maybe I should make that the rule," he said. "We can laugh at the ridiculous things people do, but we don’t turn someone’s real feelings into a punchline." Roxanne agreed completely, and something between the two of them settled into place through shared values rather than another flirtatious exchange.

That evening, sitting cross-legged on her bed, Roxanne checked the radio submission page and discovered that her own question about trusting someone after being hurt had been selected for the next broadcast. She considered withdrawing it immediately. Then she realized she’d submitted it because she genuinely wanted to think through the answer herself, not because she expected Liam to somehow identify her or offer her a special response.

She left it in the queue and closed the page, pausing to read a notification that the next broadcast would also include questions about rebuilding trust, handling uncertainty, and knowing when a relationship was worth waiting for. Roxanne set her phone down and returned to her unfinished homework, though her mind kept drifting back to it anyway, the question sitting at the edge of her thoughts for the rest of the night.

The following afternoon, cutting through the arts corridor on her way to the library, she happened to pass the radio room and heard Liam rehearsing his introduction through the half-open door. "Today’s first question is about trusting someone again after you’ve been hurt," he said, his voice carrying clearly into the corridor. Roxanne stopped outside the door without meaning to.

Liam continued, his voice more thoughtful than she had ever heard it sound on air before. "You don’t have to trust someone just because they want you to," he said. "But you also don’t have to let the person who hurt you decide what everyone else gets to be." Roxanne stood there in the corridor until the next song finally began playing. She didn’t know whether the advice would change anything for her, not really, but she knew, standing there in the quiet corridor with her bag slung over one shoulder, that

she wanted to hear the rest of it anyway.