Archive of Our Own

“This is…Connor…he wanted you to have this.”

For the first time in his life, Evan Hansen sat in the principal’s office. Not for the first time, he was at a loss for what to say, completely hinging his next actions on the actions of the people near him, studying them for some sign but unable to come up with much in the frantic, muddled place his anxious brain had become. 

The woman across from him - Cynthia Murphy, mother of Connor and Zoe-suddenly reached out a hand. The paper she’d pulled from her purse only moments before was now held in her outstretched hand. It was a sort of olive branch in Evan’s mind. Larry, her husband, looked at Evan expectantly. He took it uncertainly, casted arm still pressed against his thighs to hide the ‘Connor’ scrawled across it. As the room stood still, Evan unfolded the paper, which had clearly been rumpled and unfolded and refolded several times.

Dear Evan Hansen , it began. The room flashed for a moment, Larry and Cynthia gone and a printer in front of him, this letter clenched in Connor’s fist, where he’d seen it before. But Larry’s voice cut through the silence and he was back on the couch, the old, rough fabric sensible even through his jeans. 

“We didn’t…we hadn’t heard your name before, Connor never…but then we saw… ‘Dear Evan Hansen.’”

Evan shook his head, shaking the sound of a printer starting up from his mind. “He, um, he gave you this?”

Cynthia finally spoke up, dodging his question. Her eyes were too bright, too shining and sad and desperate, as they bore a hole between his eyes. “We didn’t know you were friends.”

“We didn’t think that Connor had any friends,” Larry parroted. “And then we see this note and it’s, it seems to suggest pretty clearly that you and Connor were, or at least for Connor, he thought of you as…” Larry gestured at the note in his hand, voice dying in his throat. He clearly wasn’t used to that happening. “I mean, it’s right there. ‘Dear Evan Hansen.’ It’s addressed to you. He wrote it to you.”

“I’m sorry, but what - why - you think he wrote this to me?”

“These are the words he wanted to share with you. His…last words.”

“This is what he wanted to leave you with,” Cynthia said, voice shaky and uncertain. Something in it was desperately familiar to Evan.

“I’m sorry…his last words?”

Larry cleared his throat while Cynthia stifled a sob next to him. His eyes were the color of the wall behind him, drab and dark. The sound of a printer filled the air and Evan’s ears. Footsteps sounded behind him. Evan forced his eyes away from the printed letter to look into Larry’s eyes, those sad, dark, expectant eyes. 

“Connor…uh…Connor took his own life.”

The computer lab was almost completely empty, save for a figure he’d barely given a second glance. It was empty enough for him, for his one goal of finishing this letter. He typed something out without paying much attention to what it was. It didn’t matter. Each clack of the keys startled him more than the last. He wasn’t thinking, only moving.

He clicked print on his document, immediately hearing the printer whoosh to life. It took a moment for him to stand up and move towards it, glancing at the first piece of paper to shoot out of the printer. He only stared at it for a moment before he heard footsteps behind him, heavy and expectant. The words flashed at him from the page.

‘Dear Evan Hansen’.

The footsteps stopped behind him. He froze, unsure of what to do. His pulse quickened, blood rushing through his ears. 

Connor stopped just next to him, clearing his throat to command attention, and Evan’s head swiveled to look. “How did you break your arm?” He asked, almost monotone, like a kid forced to apologize by his teacher.

“Oh, I, uh, I fell out of a tree.” He finished, voice trailing off towards the end. 

“You fell out of a tree?” Connor said, voice and face blank. He reminded Evan eerily of a voice in Google Translate when you clicked the speaker button - no breathing, little inflection, a robotic sense of detachement.

Evan nodded quickly, more of a jerk of the head than anything else. 

Unexpectedly, Connor let out a laugh. The sound hit Evan full in the face, startling the still air. It felt familiar, almost. “That is just the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. Oh my God.”

“I know.”

Something in Evan’s tone must have pulled Connor out of his humor-induced reverie. His eyes dropped to the cast on Evan’s arm. “No one’s signed your cast.”

“No, I-I know.”

“Guess I will, then.”

A swell of something rose in him. “You don’t - you don’t have to-”

“Do you have a Sharpie?”

After a moment’s pause, Evan reached into his pocket and withdrew the sharpie. Connor accepted it. He wrote slowly, each squeak of the marker and giant stroke that shaped the letters filling the silence more effectively than words could. “No pretending we have real friends, I guess.” He said, a dark note in his tone, as he passed the sharpie back to Evan. 

“Good point.”

While Evan busied himself with the sharpie in his pocket, Connor reached for the paper in the tray. “Is this yours? It says “Dear Evan Hansen.” That’s you, right?”

“Oh, um, yeah, it is. That’s me. My name. It was a, uh, an assignment-”

But he couldn’t stop Connor’s eyes from dropping back down to the paper. “Because there’s Zoe?” He said, all traces of friendliness gone from his tone. 

Another swell of emotion. “What?”

“You meant for me to find this, right? Because this is about my sister ? You wrote this because you wanted me to find this and freak out because of some creepy shit you said about my sister, and then you could tell everyone I’m crazy, right?”

“What? I didn’t - why would I-?”

”Fuck you,” Connor spat, and this time he wasn’t monotone. It was quiet anger - anger so great it almost shook, an anger that looked almost like sadness. He brushed past Evan, knocking his shoulder into him so that Evan fell against the printer right as it made another noise. 

Barely three days later, Evan stopped short in the doorway to the principal’s office, heart already pounding out some uneven beat. 

“Uh, is Mr. Howard…? I just, sorry, they said on the loudspeaker for me to come to the principal’s office.”

“Mr. Howard is, uh, he stepped out.”

Evan nodded, unsure of what else to do or why he was there.

“We wanted to speak to you in private. If you’d like to, maybe…”

The man on the couch opposite the only free chair was intimidating. A grey suit stretched across his shoulders, the fit perfect. His voice commanded a certain attention, even as he hunched uncertainly and fiddled with his tie. It was evidently a voice that was used to having people obey its commands. The woman next to him was easy to look past until you saw her, and then you would wonder how you missed her in the first place. Although she was quiet and still, she had her own presence, too, a kind of presence that came with money and assurance and all the confidence of the two. Her face was a mask super glued back together from some broken part of her, the cracks so obvious you’d wonder how you hadn’t seen them. They were people who knew who they were and exactly what they were worth, even though an obvious sorrow cut through their postures and controlled their expressions. They were pulled by invisible strings, strings they probably didn’t know existed until this sorrow arrived to weigh them down. The strings were probably the only reason they were standing.

Evan knew he should be intimidated by them, but he, himself, knew something about sorrow, and unlike them, he’d never had strings to hold him up.

As he sat across from them, the man cleared his throat. Larry, Evan remembered, and Cynthia. The names came from some dark shadow in his mind. He could almost imagine a voice saying them, but he was cut off by the voice of Larry.

“We’re, uh… we’re Connor’s parents.”

A flash of something in his chest, squeezing his heart. Letters on a page, the smell of sharpie and something bitter. Sunlight and fluorescent light at once. “Oh?”

Without warning, Cynthia began to pull her purse open to grab something out. Larry, an expression Evan recognized as desperation on his face, filled the silence with “Why don’t you go ahead, honey-”

Tone fraught, Cynthia cut him off. “I’m going as fast as I can.” They were decidedly not looking at each other, choosing instead to train their eyes on the coffee table and the wall, respectively.

Larry’s voice was measured and thin as he responded. It was clear he’d been through this conversation before. “That’s not what I said, is it?”

Cynthia ignored him. Evan counted the beats of silence in his head. For someone so terrible with music, he’d always been able to keep a rhythm. He’d reached five before Cynthia turned back to him, hand outstretched and letter between her tightly clenched fingers.

And Dear Evan Hansen was staring up at him again.

There was more silence until Evan was pulled out of his own head, and he’d lost track of how long he’d been in silence. He said something or Cynthia said something or Larry said something, or maybe it was all three and it just blurred together, the words on the page in front of him obscuring his vision even while he looked away. 

“Connor took his own life.”

“His… last words.”

“Wanted you to…”

“It’s addressed to you.”

“...at least, he thought of you as…”

“Connor didn’t write this,” he said, coming back to the moment. He hadn’t properly looked at the Murphy’s before then, but with that choked out statement, he did. Evan hadn’t realized how his throat had narrowed and his eyes had burned until he had Cynthia’s eyes staring at him, all crinkled around the corners in a way that made his heart twist. “I wrote it.”

“What?” She said, it coming out as though it had been dragged from her throat - a raw, guttural noise. He dropped his eyes from her face. 

Larry made a similar disbelieving noise - all instinct, no planning. “He’s in shock, he doesn’t mean-”

“He didn’t write it,” Evan said a little louder, voice verging on hysterical and suddenly very aware of the tears splashing down his cheeks. He shook his head, one hand shoving the letter back to the Murphy’s in some sudden urge to get it as far away from his as possible, to have it out of his hands, have it gone. Shock may have been what was coursing through his veins, but for what, he didn’t know. His other hand reached to his heart, tapping and massaging, before falling back to his shirt hem. “It was, it was a, a therapy assignment. I wrote - wrote it. We didn’t - Connor and I-” he’s choked off. “He took it in the, the computer lab, where I, that’s where I printed it-”

He could hear the printer clearly, once, then twice. 

“I’m sorry, sorry, I’m sorry, I should-” he made to stand, dropping the letter as though it had scalded him, and he tilted a little as his vision became obscured by sudden vertigo. He couldn’t look at the Murphy’s, couldn’t even if he could see through his tear-blurred eyes, couldn’t see the disappointment in their eyes and grief in their faces, because he’d dashed their last hope of knowing their son, he’d ruined it, he’d-

A sob tore through the air. His own. 

He stumbled on his feet, and suddenly a hand wrapped around his good arm’s bicep, strong even as the person it was attached to clearly had trouble getting the words out around tears. A business card with other writing scribbled on the back was shoved in his direction, and he grabbed it blindly before wrenching his eyes up to the person’s face. Larry stared back at him, an emotion so unprocessed on his face that it very nearly tore another sob from Evan’s chest. “Please,” he said, indicating the card with his free hand. “Come-come to dinner anyway, please.”

Evan nodded, knowing at that moment he’d have agreed to anything to get out of that office and finally breathe again. 

Larry let go of his arm, his own hand dropping slowly to his side. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Cynthia, but he could hear her weeping from across the office. His hand wrapped more tightly on the card. Summoning some unknown inner strength, he turned and forced himself to walk away before he became frozen to the spot. 

“They want you to go to dinner ?” 

“Yeah.”

“Why? I mean, what good does it do to hang out with the kid their dead son had nothing to do with whatsoever?”

“God, Jared, do I seem like I know? Search me.”

“They’re crazy, probably.”

“That’s harsh.”

“What? They’re the Murphy’s. Connor’s parents. They must be. Why else would they-“

“Stop,” Evan said, and he was surprised by how harsh he sounded, especially given the fact that his eyes felt like they were burning for no reason. “They’re grieving. And Connor, he’s–” his voice trailed off. 

“Yeah, no shit, dude. It’s just weird. Everyone’s acting weirdly now.”

“It’s a weird situation,” Evan said softly. 

“You could say that again. Sabrina Patel was selling buttons at lunch.”

“ Buttons? ” 

“Yeah, like, In Memoriam buttons? In remembrance or some shit?”

“That’s terrible,” Evan breathed.

He could practically see Jared’s shrug. “I don’t know. She’s just profiting, I guess. I thought of doing the same.”

Evan hung up before Jared could say anything else.

“Why did you say that about me?”

“Say-?”

“‘ Because there’s Zoe. And all of my hope is pinned on Zoe. ’ Why did you say that?”

Evan felt something tug in his chest, Zoe’s words striking something deep. He inclined his head ever so slightly in her direction.

He inclined his head ever so slightly in his direction, a smile spreading across his face as he opened his mouth to respond.

“I don’t know, you see, I just - there’s this, there‘s this little smile thing you do, when you’re playing guitar in jazz band? It’s like, your eyes kind of close and you get this tiny smile on your face like you’re totally content in that moment and you know what you’re doing, and it’s like, it’s like you’re letting us in on this secret without saying anything.” Her eyes meet his, brewing with confusion, and he taps a strange rhythm on his thigh, thoughts racing. 

“You know your smile? It’s really nice. I never see it, it feels like, but when you smile, it’s like...it’s like everything is, hilarious, I guess, you know? Everything is, everything is good. It feels...like, like I’ve been accepted when you smile at me.”

He started again. “I went to your jazz band concerts, and there was something about your playing and your smile and all of it - there was something about it, something just really...something that’s really, really subtle, and perfect, and...real, I guess.” He swallowed against a sudden lump in his throat. “It made me feel...wonderful.”

He smiles, and his heart skips a beat. “There’s something about a nice smile, I guess. If it is nice. If it’s nice, it’s really nice.” He pauses before he continues. “You know, she has a nice smile. I always feel really...wonderful, when she smiles at me. Even if I can’t show it.”

He doesn’t need to say who she is. 

“Really?” She said softly, and Evan looked back up, her eyes startlingly clear and focused. He couldn’t quite read the expression on her face or the tone of her voice, but it had softened considerably, the freckles around her nose relaxing against the rest of her face rather than scrunching up in self-defense. 

“Yeah,” he said, the corners of his lips quirking. “And...and I noticed how you’d scribble stars on the,” he pointed to her crossed ankles, and her gaze dropped to them, her cheeks tingeing slightly pink, from what he could discern, “on the cuffs of your jeans, see? And I’d see you in, in the library, and the hallways, and like, half of the time you’d be filling out one of those-those quizzes in those teen magazines.”

Her eyes flitted back up to his, still guarded. “Did you really?”

He nodded quickly, hand still tapping at his thigh. 

The edge of her lip twitched momentarily, and Evan almost thought she was about to give him one of her thousand-watt smiles, but it became neutral a moment later. He hadn’t noticed until just that moment, but she’d been choosing and shaping her words so carefully before then - so clearly thought out, although he’d missed it. The next words were rushed and hurried, her lisp slipping in, syllables blending just ever so slightly more. He almost got lost in that different feel-how almost intimate it felt, to have her speak differently than he’d ever heard her, but he couldn’t escape the feeling it was more from desperation than comfort. “Did...did you notice anything else?”

Still caught up in his train of thought, it took him a second to respond. “About...about you?” He said, voice tilting up at the ‘ou.’

If her previous words had been lax, these were negligent: “Never mind, I don’t really care anyways, it’s just-”

Maybe it was the way the guard immediately went back up in her eyes. Maybe it was the tone of what she said, the familiarity he felt at every moment of his life, the anxiety and disappointment and fear laced through the words. Maybe it was because she seemed upset more than anything. But suddenly he was rushing over everything else, to stop her from standing, from turning away, from slipping out of his fingers like on the first day of school. 

From slipping out of his fingers that afternoon, a light hum and uncertainty hanging in the air, a glint in his eye he could understand but didn’t know how to interpret. 

“No, I, uh, it’s just, there were more - many things, I’m trying to think of - trying to think of the...best ones?”

She didn’t respond, but she didn't leave, either, and so he forged ahead. 

“Um,” his hand, which had been picking nervously at the edge of his cast, fell to his side as he finally thought of something. He ignored how his heart warmed at the memory, and he hoped she couldn’t see right through him. “I know that I, I thought that you looked really pretty-er, uh, pretty cool!-when you put those, um, those indigo streaks in your hair.”

“You did?” Zoe said, either genuinely not having heard his slip-up or graciously ignoring it. Something in her tone urged Evan to meet her eyes, and he identified it a moment later - hope, shining out from the uncertainty. 

“Yeah,” he said quickly, giving her a half-smile. “And, and, I saw you dance - that sounds creepy, but in the cafeteria sometimes you’d kind of - grab your friends and make them dance with you funnily? And at school dances, you’d just dance - you’d dance like no one else was there. And it was like, you didn’t care what anyone else thought? Or if it was awkward and it was just - I thought it was - perfect? But I was too - I was always too scared to say anything-”

He’s cut off by her lips, pressed against his. They’d been leaning ever so slightly forward towards each other as he talked, and at some point, he’d gained the courage to meet her eyes again, and the skin just in the corner had crinkled in some complicated way, and her nose had scrunched a little, and he could see her lips work ever so slightly, and he’d never been close enough to see those little pools of lighter brown in her eyes, and then she’d closed the distance between them. Their lips were pressed together for maybe a second before she pulled away again, but it felt like simultaneously a lifetime and no time at all, the feeling of it played again and again on repeat, the jolt of the slightly rough feel of her lips had given him, the taste of chapstick and some fruity Seltzer, the way it felt as though they’d melted together for just that one moment. As she pulled away and his eyes opened again (he’d closed them?) everything seemed sharper and more in focus, like every one of his nerves had been zapped awake. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, and her words were once again careless. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I - what the hell,” she added, almost under her breath, more to herself than him, he knew. She looked away from him quickly.

“Dinner’s ready!” Cynthia called, her voice traveling up the stairs. They both jumped up immediately. Zoe quickly made to move past him. He could’ve sworn her eyes shimmered with unshed tears. 

“And you were-you were always nice to me,” Evan said. She paused, back still to him. The caramel brown of her hair contrasted against the white of her blouse in a way that made it quite easy for him to look at it. “Not just me. To everyone. Even when it seemed like everyone else-“ he cut off. “You weren’t. Even if you didn’t realize it. You are - you are good, Zoe Murphy. And that first day of school…”

“Tell them to eat without me,” Zoe said, and Evan knew for sure that the force obstructing her voice was tears. “I’m sorry, I, I can’t.”

His heart twisted as she hurried out of the door, her tear-choked voice hanging in the air. 

“Guys?” Cynthia called, concern edging into her voice. 

“Would anyone like more chicken?”

“I think you’re the only one with an appetite, Larry.”

Two days before Zoe kissed Evan, they sat across from each other at a dining table with five chairs. His was shoved hurriedly between Cynthia and Larry’s, and the one next closest to Zoe was simply (achingly) empty. He thought he could see a curved shadow in it for just a moment, but it was gone a second later. 

“The Harrises brought it over,” Larry said, defensiveness creeping into his tone. Evan didn’t have to glance over at Cynthia to see the disapproving look she threw at Larry; he could feel it over his shoulder. He looked down at his plate instead, one hand picking at his cast. As his gaze moved downward, he couldn’t help but notice Zoe’s eyes on him, one hand sluggishly pushing her chicken around with a fork. 

“We used to go skiing together,” Cynthia explained for Evan. 

“Connor hated it,” Zoe bit out. 

“Zoe,” Larry said, and that was the end of that conversation. 

“I, um. I’ve never skied.” Evan said, desperate to fill the heavy silence between the Murphy’s. Larry nodded, but that was the extent of his interaction. 

“Why did he sign your cast?” Zoe said suddenly. When Evan turned to look at her, her eyes were bright. 

“Um-what?”

“Your cast.” She said, ignoring Cynthia’s death glare. “He signed it. In giant fucking letters.” (Larry interrupted with a scandalized ’Zoe!’, but she ignored him). “Why did he do that if you weren’t friends?”

Evan’s mouth twisted downwards. “He, um. He offered. In the computer lab. Said something about pretending we had friends.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Cynthia looked down and away from him, but Zoe at least seemed to understand where he was coming from. 

“That makes sense,” she muttered. “You know, it’s kind of weird. The only time I ever saw you guys together was when he shoved you at school last week.”

“Connor shoved you?” Cynthia breathed. 

Looking back at Zoe, something hardened in her gaze, in the corners of her eyes, Evan wondered how he’d never seen the resemblance between her and Connor before. Maybe he’d never realized just how bitter they could look, their shared expression of trepidation. He didn’t like hers leveled at him. 

“I, um. I tripped.”

“He pushed you. Hard. I saw the whole thing. How’d he get from that to signing your cast?”

Evan closed his eyes, opened them again. The story sprang off of his tongue. “He was upset. Someone - someone made a rude joke. I coughed and he thought I was laughing at him. He pushed me.”

Cynthia frowned. “That wasn’t very nice.”

“Well, Connor wasn’t very nice, so that makes sense,” Zoe snapped. 

She must’ve known she crossed a line, but she didn’t seem to regret it at all. Cynthia shut her own eyes. Larry glanced up from his chicken sharply. The silence that settled over them was deadly. Evan was afraid to breathe for fear of breathing in the shrapnel coming off of their glares. 

“Connor was a...complicated person.”

“No, Connor was a bad person. There’s a difference.”

Larry finally decided to intervene. “Zoe, that’s enough.”

“You agree with me. Don’t pretend you don’t,” Zoe said, her eyes flashing to Larry. He froze in his seat. 

“You refuse to see any of the good things!” Cynthia shouted. 

“Because there were none! What were the good things, mom?” Zoe returned her mother’s volume. 

“There were-” Cynthia’s voice broke off, and her eyes cut to Evan’s face. Her meaning was clear. “Not here, Zoe. Not in front of our guest.”

“What were the good things, mom? Tell me!”

“There were good things!”

“Connor could be good,” Evan found himself saying. All three sets of eyes snapped to him. He couldn’t have handled watching Cynthia grow more distressed for another moment. 

“What?” Zoe said. She seemed to regret how much edge there had been in her words a second later, but her eyes didn’t yield a single inch. 

Evan hedged. “I mean. He. He signed my cast? And he was, well. He was the only person who did that. Or even wanted to, really. No one else noticed. Or, or cared, I guess.”

Cynthia’s eyes were latched onto him. Zoe looked away, back at her plate. He wondered if she could hear him saying no way, Jose just as clearly as he could. 

“I think, I think there were a lot of those, um, those small moments,” he said finally. 

His hand ghosted over a new scrape. “Where’d that happen?”

“Oh, I just got into a fight with a notebook.”

“There aren’t a lot - a lot of people who see those?”

“Are you sure you’re okay to be out tonight? You look tired.”

Evan shook his head a little. “He did, though. With everyone, I think.”

Cynthia seemed to be on the verge of tears again, but they were a happier kind of tears. 

He was invited back to dinner as often as he wanted to come. 

Later, he’d stand in front of the Murphys’ table. “The Connor Project,” he said, letting it sink in. Jared Kleinman and Alana Beck were on either side of him, makeshift pamphlets in their hands. Cynthia looked up from the pamphlet. For the first time, she seemed able to truly meet his eye.  

“The...Connor Project?”

“Yeah,” Evan said. “Something to make sure that no one else feels like Connor did. To, to preserve his memory.”

He was aware of Zoe’s eyes on his face. He didn’t think they’d ever left, but he couldn’t be sure. 

“There’ll be a massive online presence,” Jared said from his side. “Resources, hotlines, chats that are heavily monitored, those types of things.”

Alana, after offering her condolences to the family, picked up her part of the pitch with great enthusiasm. “And a fundraising drive, so we can hopefully create more resources and do something in honor of Connor. All of it started with an all-school memorial assembly.”

Evan’s gaze angled to Zoe. She seemed surprised that he could even see her; she’d been entirely quiet in this din of noise. “Maybe jazz band could do something.”

She nodded after a moment, seemingly caught off guard. “Yeah, maybe,” she said quietly. He couldn’t quite read the emotion on her face. 

“I didn’t realize Connor meant this much to people,” Larry said. Like his daughter, he’d barely said anything before. His thumb rubbed over the faux pamphlet, his mouth twisting into a deep frown. 

“Oh, Evan, this is wonderful,” Cynthia said half a second later. He was startled but not surprised to see tears sparkling in her eyes. She stood and crossed the kitchen in surprisingly short strides, her arms enveloping Evan in a warm hug for a minute. She hugged Jared after him; Jared didn’t seem to know what to do, caught off-guard by the sudden affection. Alana was next; Cynthia whispered something to her, and Alana whispered something back, but Evan had no idea what either said. They each smiled a moment later. Evan’s gaze fell back to Zoe. She’d seemed to shrink back into herself at the table, but when he met her eyes, one of the corners of her lips tugged just the barest hint outwards. He was sure he was the only one to catch it. For whatever reason, to everyone but him, Zoe Murphy may as well have not been in the room at all. 

He’d stand in front of their kitchen table again, head ringing and tears imminent, Zoe so far from smiling he’d wonder how she was even functioning. 

Everyone would see him again, and they’d see her, too, but there would be something else to see, too. Someone. The Connor Project in its entirety, at its ugliest, at its core. 

But Zoe smiled at him, over but not because of the Connor Project, and he could see her and she could see him. That was a pretty big deal, in and of itself. Sometimes that’s all we need to feel like enough, one person seeing us. Sometimes that’s all we need to think that someone else is enough to make us feel human again. 

“Whatever happened when you fell from the tree?”

The question fell from Zoe’s lips where they rested just above his shoulder. Her head was resting on it while they sat outside one of the outer walls of the school. Her arm was wrapped tight around his waist, and his hand held hers with practiced ease. The way their fingers laced together still sent butterflies through his stomach at the first touch but quickly settled him afterward. Holding hands with Zoe was starting to feel as easy as breathing. He let his head drop to rest against the top of hers. 

“What?”

“I mean...who found you? Your coworkers? Random park goers? It just sounds like it must’ve been a terrible fall.”

For a moment, he remembered the feel of a different hand in his and the catch of light on brown hair. But another second later and it was gone. 

“No one,” he said. “I had to go find my boss.”

Zoe took in a sharp breath. Her arm drew him even closer to her, and her head dropped more to press a kiss to his shoulder. He felt his heart warm and widen at the movement. More than anything, he just felt safe and content with Zoe next to him. 

He shared what happened when he fell from the tree.

“Good morning, students and faculty. I would, um, I would just like to say a few words to you today about...our classmate, Connor Murphy, on behalf of the, um, the Connor Project community.”

He felt like he was going to choke. Like the lights would drown him and he'd disappear forever, lost in all but the minds of the entire school in front of him. The entire school.

“I didn’t know Connor that well. But Connor was always there, whether we knew it or not. Whether we acknowledged him or not.”

His cards nearly fell from his hands. He choked on a building cough, but he kept going.

“I wish Connor were still here, because then maybe I’d know him enough to give a proper speech about him. Maybe I’d know him as more than the boy who was kind enough to sign, um, sign my cast when no one else would.”

He flipped a notecard.

“Good morning, students and...um, uh.”

This was his worst nightmare, coming to life. He shuffled through his notecards. He may have heard a laugh building up in the crowd, but he couldn’t be certain.

All of the cards went flying and it was so silent you could hear a pin drop.

Instead, he dropped. He went to the ground, hands flying to pick them up. It was useless. He couldn't grab them. He looked up towards the sky, the lights, whispering um s that barely made it out of his throat, choking on tears of frustration and sorrow. He was trapped under those lights, harsh and unnatural. Why not sunlight over the horizon? Like when he broke his arm. These lights were artificial, but weren’t they the same as the outside? Wasn’t he the same person he’d been then?

He wanted to disappear, swallowed up by the light he could see as far as he looked. Why couldn’t he just disappear?

Evan swore he could feel Connor’s gaze on him, the weight of his giant sharpie name on the cast on his arm.

Light on the horizon. Sharp pain in his arm. Connor saved him, right? (Not literally, of course. How would that be possible?) He wished everything was different. He wished someone noticed him. Them. The two of them. They shouldn’t disappear into background noise, the deafening silence of a crowd of people waiting for him to fix things in their minds. 

And after a deep breath, he stood, notecards forgotten on the ground. His eyes dropped to the first row of chairs, where he could swear a pair of eyes stared back into his like they did across the Murphy’s kitchen table. 

Connor. 

With a quick nod from him, a plastic, detached version of the real thing in the computer lab that day - with his robotic voice and jerky movements - words sprang off of Evan’s tongue.

“ I, uh, I broke my arm this summer. Obviously.”

A chuckle went through the crowd, hesitant, uncertain, probably because of the tears still drying on his cheeks.

“Um. I was working at Ellison State Park. It was the morning, and it was just - it was so beautiful. I loved it, really. No one else was there. I was so-so lonely. All summer, really. I was, uh, I was invisible.

“When I fell from a tree, I thought it would be better. Maybe, like maybe I’d be gone for good?”

There was a deafening silence, then.

“But I just broke my arm. I was still there. No one, no one really saw me, still. Through the rest of the summer. Until-until Connor signed my cast, first day of school. He wasn’t the person to find me that day I broke my arm. But in a roundabout way, he found me eventually. Just by being there, and being open to someone he barely knew. It was enough to feel seen.

“I wish I could’ve done that for him. Made him feel seen. I wish we all could have done that. And I hope that’s what we do in the future. Provide some way for us all to be seen. We should all be found by each other. We will find each other, and we will help each other. We need to at least try.”

He almost ended it there, but then he said, “There should always be someone to find you. Even if it looks like there isn’t, keep your eyes open. Someone will find you when you fall from a tree and think there’s no tomorrow. Someone will find you.”

The lights swallowed him up, and then they were gone. He was lying in the grass for a moment before the sunlight - no, the stage light - cleared from his eyes. The sound of applause was deafening, and when he searched for Connor in the front row he came up short.

He was just relieved to be done speaking, but that would be far from his last moment with that speech. The next morning, he’d be on almost every major news source, thanks to a video of his speech Alana posted on the Connor Project social media. He’d rush to the Murphy’s, stand in front of their table, try to understand their gratitude at what he’d done. He’d get a rush of Instagram followers. He’d immediately start filming more videos with Alana. He’d learn to see the outpouring of gratitude for his words, learn to share more as time went on. 

His mother would see it, and she’d barge into his room, face pale, and pull him into her arms. She’d hug him close and whisper apologies he said she didn’t need to share, and she’d tell him just how proud she was of him, how fantastic he is, her smart, brave boy who managed to say all of that in front of everyone.

And he’d find Zoe in her room, watching his speech on her laptop. She’d shut it as soon as he walked in, all of her attention focused on him. And she’d start to say something, maybe, to thank him, to thank him for trying and for doing this all for her family and for making her realize the impact of his words, but he’d kiss her and pull away a second later. And before he could run, she’d kiss him back, and some small, selfish corner of his brain may think that this made all the other parts of his speech worth it, just to feel Zoe Murphy’s fingers twined through his hair and his body pressing against hers. But deep down, he had a feeling it would come to all of that anyway, that he and Zoe were meant to be this version of themselves. Together. Larger than life, an emotion so strong he couldn’t begin to imagine it.

For once in his life, Evan was more than just Evan. 

(Once? a tiny corner of his brain said, a pair of eyes across from a table, a hand grasping his right hand with a fierce protectiveness and steady squeeze.)

It was so unspeakably nice to have the knowledge that, outside the four walls of his room and the screen of his laptop, people watched the videos he and Alana filmed. With every “Hello, Connor Project Community!” he became just a little more seen, and even though Alana talked over him half of the time, there were a few time their eyes met in the webcam and they just smiled, because they’d done something. It was the same with Jared; no more assertions of family friends, but then spent together working in a comfortable silence.

He never hears from his father as the weeks go by and his cast comes off. (“Zoe must be happy, huh? Must be a real turn off, trying to get it on with her dead brother’s name giant on your cast.” That didn’t sit very well in his stomach.) But when Larry offers to go through stuff in the basement with him - and Cynthia and Zoe roll their eyes in exasperation - he really is happy to listen. Larry told him partway through that he was a really good listener, and he couldn’t help but feel his chest inflate a bit with pride. He doesn’t know anything about sports, doesn’t even care. But it’s so nice to have Larry joke with him, show him his years and years of collecting, give him a glove like there’s nothing in the world he’d rather be doing then spending the afternoon with Evan Hansen. That’s a nice feeling, the knowledge that someone wants to spend time with you. 

And there’s Zoe, of course. But she can barely be captured by words. Perhaps more than anyone else, she’s the one that makes him feel least like just Evan. Because they are a pair, and it feels so nice to have someone else on his side, making the good parts of life seem fantastic and the bad parts seem inconsequential. When they make eye contact and laugh to themselves across the garage, or when she grabs his hand at school or after, or when they just sit next to each other, heads leaning onto each other, he doesn’t feel like solitary, lonely Evan. He feels - knows - that he is part of a pair, and the other side will always be there so they can hold each other up. 

“We don’t need to talk about the Connor Project.”

“Oh,” Evan said. “Okay.”

“No, I just...I want to know. But I also want...I want to have this time with you. Just for us.”

“For our kegger?”

The corners of her mouth twitched. “Obviously.”

“Oh, good.”

After a pause, Zoe continued. “My brother...he had so much of my life. So much of my time. I feel like everything in my family...it was his. And I really just need something...for me.”

Up this close, Evan was pulled in, again, by the look in her eyes, the freckles on her cheeks, the curve of her lips, the affection and determination in her eyes. The space between her eyebrows furrowed just the slightest bit, and he reached out and grabbed her hand. His heart jumped a beat into his throat. He swore he could count the stars in her eyes if he tried enough. She reached a hand up to cup his cheek. 

“You don’t have to impress me, Evan. You’re enough. You’re more than enough. You’re...everything. You don’t have to convince me of anything, okay? I know who you are. I know what we’re in the middle of. Ignore that doubting voice in your head.”

He smiled at her, and her eyes softened. In the soft lighting of his bedroom, he felt she was an angel come to save him, the floral pattern of her dress caught in the reflection of the daylight and the sleeve of her denim jacket rubbing against their entwined hands. She’d taken all of the anxious energy that normally followed him in waves and she’d thrown it out the window with a flick of her wrist. She’d stolen the air from his lungs and ignited every nerve in his body. She’d steadied the air around him, made him comfortable with the curve of her calloused fingers on his. He only hoped he could do the same for her.

“I know you, Evan Hansen. And I know you outside of anything else. You’re...you’re mine. And I’m yours. It’s just us, okay? Nothing to live up to. Nothing to worry about.” She smiled. “Just us. Zoe and Evan.”

“Zoe and Evan,” he echoed, unable to stop the grin on his face. A pair. A matching set. “I could get used to that.”

Her hand dropped from his face to his shoulder. “I plan on making you get used to it for quite a long time, actually.”

“I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

When she kissed him, he swore he could have lifted the stars from the sky and brought them down to her simply with the sweeping wave of affection and joy and love he felt for Zoe Murphy, for every constellation splashed on her cheeks. 

“Because I know what it’s like to feel invisible just like you did!” Alana said, her hand curling around her backpack strap. Evan chose to focus on that rather than the way the floor seemed to have bottomed out beneath him. “But you don’t seem to understand that that’s why I’m doing this.”

He swallowed past a lump in his throat. “I get it,” he said. “I’m sorry, Alana. I understand. I know. I know that feeling.”

“I think you might have forgotten that other people do, too. That Connor might have. That’s why we’re doing this.”

“I know! I know!”

“You’re not showing that, Evan. You’re not.”

“I’m…I’m sorry. I’ll try harder. I’ll do more.”

Alana just sighed. “Please, Evan. We’re trying to do something here. We’re trying to help people. Raise money. I’m not sure about your story, and neither are the community.”

His stomach flips unpleasantly, landing about six inches higher than it should. 

“Do me a favor, from one invisible person to another,” she says. Something in her tone forced his eyes to meet hers. “Don’t let someone else go forgotten, okay? Just...I’d prefer you didn’t lie to me, but God, at least admit everything to yourself.”

Evan wasn’t quite sure when he first saw Connor. It may have been in the audience at his speech, or maybe curled into his chair in the Murphy’s kitchen at one of their countless meals. 

In his mind’s eye, he fell from a tree. 

“Oh, that’s a nice story. You let go?”

But with the fragments of his and Alana’s conversation from the week before echoing in his ears, Connor was more present to him than he ever had been. Actually speaking instead of just staring.

“Yes. Yes, I let go. I wanted to…I wanted to…”

“Did you let go? Or did you fall?”

"At least admit everything to yourself.”

“I…I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Is it true that no one came to get you that day?”

“Yes! I was…I was alone. Just like I told Zoe.”

“I don’t give a shit what you told Zoe. What happened?”

“I was alone.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Evan. You can’t even tell the truth to yourself.”

“Admit it to yourself.”

“It’s the truth! I don’t…”

“Oh yeah?” Connor, the fake and cleansed one, suddenly leaned in close to where Evan’s face was as he sat on the bed. “Maybe you should think again.”

Something wrong struck Evan just then. It turned over a dog eared page in his head, but he shook it rapidly and squeezed his eyes shut to keep it down. Shadows flicked at the edges of his vision and colors exploded against his eyelids with the force he closed them.

one

two

three

He had never thought of himself as a person of habit before, but he became rather attached to his new routine with the Murphy’s. His mother was home for dinner Tuesdays and Thursdays, so he stayed home those nights unless he could claim a Spanish project and say he needed to go to Jared’s. But most nights, he walked to the Murphy’s with Zoe and stayed for dinner and sometimes slept over. He was used to that routine, and that day wasn’t any different. 

Looking back on it, Zoe, perhaps, seemed a bit bouncier than usual on the walk home, tugging Evan forward by their joined hands a bit more persistently than normal. And maybe he’d noticed the extra car parked down the street, but he didn’t look closely enough to see that it was his car before Zoe wrapped a quick squeeze around his waist and bounced forward to her front door, leaving Evan to trail after her like a lovesick puppy. 

And then they walked through the entryway and into the living room, and Evan felt his entire body jolt to a stop without planning it. His mother perched on the edge of a chair, a wine glass held in her hand so delicately he wondered if she wanted to be holding it at all. 

Zoe smiled even more broadly, bounding forward and holding out a hand to shake as she was so wont to do. Heidi shook it with an air of confusion.

“This, um, this was your idea?” Evan heard himself say. He wanted to smile at the look of joy on her face, but the overwhelming sense of confusion on his mother’s made it impossible. He had a creeping feeling of foreboding in his gut.

Evan sat in a free chair and Zoe perched on the armrest. He could feel his mother’s eyes on him, but he was truthfully on autopilot. He could feel himself curling into himself, trying to take up less space, but he didn’t stop it. He knew, in his gut, that it would end poorly.

And then Larry and Cynthia offered to pay for his college tuition.

His first thought, stupidly, was of those printed-out college essay contests sitting in a stack on his bedside table. He’d barely glanced at them, but his mother had gone to all that work to print them out.

“No. No thank you,” Heidi said firmly, already standing to leave. “I appreciate it, but I assure you, we can make it on our own.”

That was the first time she’d referred to Evan as part of the family unit in a while. Most of the time she placed all of the responsibility on herself whenever finances came up, but now she included Evan in the ‘we.’ It felt almost like she was trying to assert a claim over him, like she thought the Murphys were trying to use him as a proxy for Connor.

“Of course, no, I’m so sorry. We simply meant….well, Evan has been such help with everything. We wanted to repay him some of his kindness,” Cynthia said, so earnestly no one could doubt it.

“That won’t be necessary,” Heidi said, her eyes flicking over to Evan. “But thank you. We appreciate it.”

“Do you know how humiliating it is? To see that your son has joined a new family and you didn’t even know? To have someone offer you something I could never give you? Do you know that, Evan?”

“If you’re sure,” Cynthia said softly. “But I hope you recognize that it’s an open offer, anyways. For anything. We mean it.”

”I feel like you aren’t telling me the whole truth, Evan, and that scares me.”

“I can’t tell myself the truth!” He heard himself shout. ”I don’t know what’s real anymore, mom, but I know that you’re never here. That’s enough for me to understand about you.”

He didn’t really mean any of it, not the way that she meant her words. But hers weren’t as harsh, while his cut deep. They were at a standstill, and neither knew how to proceed.

“I’m trying my hardest,” she said eventually, her jaw set and words measured. ”I am trying my best. Shit, Evan. I am trying to give you the best life I can. I’m sorry I can’t give you what they can give you.”

“At least they don’t think I’m some-I’m some broken thing, some burden, just need to check on the meds and you’re-”

“Shit, Evan. I am your mother! It is my job to make sure you’re happy, you’re okay, and I - you’ve been there all year! I didn’t know! I can’t-” and here her voice sounded sad rather than angry, “I can’t protect you. But I can make sure your meds are set. That’s - that’s all I can do. That’s all I do all day. Shit, I need to do it for you.”

He shook his head, crossing the room to burn off anxious energy. “I’m not a job over there. I’m not broken. I’m not part of a job.”

Ice crowding out fatigue in her voice, she found words again. “It must be nice to have the luxury of forgetting responsibilities. But I don’t have that.”

He shook his head again. Neither of them knew what to say; they weren’t good at fighting, especially not with each other. They weren’t used to it. But there seemed to be nothing else left to say, so he went to his room. Heidi didn’t follow him. 

four

five

After five precise beats Evan opened his eyes again slowly, looking back up at Connor. There was still something removed to him, plastic, almost, yet after a moment it melted away and Connor leaned in to squeeze his arms around Evan’s shoulders.

Suddenly everything sparked.

The computer lab was almost completely empty. He typed out some meaningless message, creating something veneered to show his therapist. Each clack of the keys startled him more than the last. He wasn’t thinking, only moving.

He clicked print on his document, immediately hearing the printer whoosh to life. It took a moment for him to stand up and move towards it, grabbing the first piece of paper to shoot out of the printer. He glanced at it for a moment before he heard footsteps behind him, heavy and expectant. The words flashed at him from the page again.

‘Dear Evan Hansen.’

He froze, unsure of what to do. His pulse quickened, blood rushing through his ears. The footsteps stopped behind him.

Connor’s arms were still around him as he pulled back slightly, looking into Evan’s eyes, suddenly as real as his own.

“I don’t deserve to be forgotten, Evan,” Connor said softly, and that déjà vu hit him again.

He hadn’t written those words.

“Please,” Connor said, and Evan had had this conversation already, had sat like this with Connor’s arms around him, had heard each word puncture his soul like this before. “Please don’t let me fade away.”

Evan shoved him away, suddenly and harshly. Connor staggered back, posture melting back into something half plastic.

Evan didn’t know what to do.

He looked up at him, expression already fading. “What about my parents? How can you do this to them?”

He only shook his head, feeling his throat narrow. 

Connor persisted, even as he tensed more. “After everything they’ve done for you? You could help them.”

“I-they don’t need me.” Evan hated how choked his voice sounded. 

He scoffed. “Yeah, they don’t need you to keep lying to them.”

“They don’t need my help!”

“Do they seem like a pretty happy family to you?” For a moment, Connor seemed to regain expression, his cheeks flushed with anger, words infused with the famous Murphy venom. He broke eye contact with Evan for only a moment, and he was surprised by how uneven Connor’s voice sounded when he continued, eyes filled with steel. “What you’re hiding from them, it could be the only thing to keep them together.”

He couldn’t look away from Connor, even as his eyes watered. He shook his head, feeling his pulse elevate. 

“What about Zoe?”

“Zoe said, she just…she wants me.”

“Right.”

“She likes me for who I am.”

“Sound familiar?” He didn’t respond, and Connor’s voice melted somewhat. He could’ve sworn he smelled the acrid scent of burning plastic in the air. “You didn’t happen to tell her, everything you’ve said about how you felt-it was all one big fucking lie.”

“It wasn’t!”

Scathing, sarcastic. For some reason, his heart twisted as he heard it in something that felt eerily akin to nostalgia. “Oh, that’s right. You left that out.”

Connor’s face shifted again, starting to change before a buzz startled the air. Evan turned away from him to fish his phone out of his pocket. It was Alana, a video chat.

He turned back to Connor, but he was gone, and before he could really recognize it he pressed accept. 

“Hello, Evan,” Alana said, words clipped short, before Evan could even say hello. 

“He-”

“We’re still a thousand dollars off from our goal.”

“I know, Alana. I’m sorry. I’m going to-I’m going to do something. I’ve been a terrible co-president. But I’ll do whatever it is. I’ll-I’ll film more videos, yeah? I’ll get it done. I want this to work.”

“What’s the point, Evan? You’ve already made it clear to me that you’re not invested in seeing the Connor Project grow. Why should I trust you now? We need something that will captivate our audience. You don’t have anything.”

“I-” He saw Connor across from him. He shook his head, his forearms rested on his knees where he crouched on the floor. 

“Don’t, Evan,” he said. He knew Alana couldn’t hear Connor, but Evan wished she could hear him for just a moment. 

“I don’t know, Alana. I’m-I’m the one who came up with the idea, I talked to the Murphy’s, I - I wrote a note they thought was his!”

Connor dropped his head into his hands. 

“What?” Alana said. 

“He - I wrote it for an - for myself. And Connor took it. He had it with him when, well. He had it. And that’s how this whole mess started.”

“You wrote something indistinguishable to a suicide note that Connor just happened to take and keep in his pocket?”

“Yes. I did. I can - I can send it to you!”

Which he did.

“Evan,” Alana said. Her voice was gentler than it had been the entire time. He finally brought his nervous eyes back to his screen rather than just on the blank patch of the wall behind Connor. “Did you really write this?”

“Yes.”

“Connor, he had it on him when he was found?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t write it?”

“No!” 

“He just...happened to have a note that you wrote on him when he was found. A note like this…” She shook her head. “That’s quite the coincidence, Evan.”

“Yeah. It is.”

Alana shook her head again. She seemed wearier with every passing second. “I don’t know. I’m not entirely certain it is. I feel like there are too many inconsistencies. I’m not so certain you’re telling the truth.” She smiled ruefully, continuing before he could even process that. “I could publish this, I guess. It might spark some interest. Show people how far you’ve come.”

He couldn’t ignore the wave of panic that overcame him, starting deep in his stomach and cresting up above his head. “No, no, no.”

“Isn’t that why you gave it to me?” She said.

He shook his head. “No, that’s not why-I just. I wanted to. To show you.”

Her eyes studied him for one long moment. She shook her head back at him. “Okay, Evan. I have another thousand dollars to raise in less than twenty-four hours. I suggest you start deciding what you know is true. Get back to admitting it to yourself, yeah? I might post it. I might not. But until you actually make up your mind as to how involved you’re going to be - how honest you’re going to be, with me and everyone else -  I can’t help you. You can’t even help yourself.”

And with those words, Alana was gone. He dropped his phone into his lap. He hunched forward, leaning his elbows onto his knees. His head fell into his hands. 

He felt rather than saw Connor’s body closer to his immediately as the call ended. Judged on feeling alone, Connor was only a few inches away. Evan, still struggling to really breathe properly, lifted his head. He met eyes with Connor again. 

He was in the computer lab, holding a note addressed to himself that he wrote, and Connor Murphy was angry because of his stupid crush on his sister, and the steps behind him slowed and hung hesitantly in the air, and Evan never wrote this note, he’d never seen the words on the page before. He picked this up from the printer thinking it was a therapy letter, but no, it’s not his, it’s-

Connor-suddenly real, again, alive if only in his mind-leaned forward and pressed his lips to Evan’s.

Connor stopped just next to him, clearing his throat to command attention, and Evan’s head swiveled to look. “How did you break your arm?” He asked, almost monotone, like a kid forced to apologize by his teacher.

Evan’s pulled back to the present, to the feel of Connor’s mouth against his, and suddenly the page is flipped over and sunlight breaks through every crack in his brain and the orchard spreads out in front of him, Connor laughing just next to him. They’re racing up a tree, breathless and full of wonder, Evan pausing just for a moment to see the sky. It’s an expanse of blue that stares right back at him, and he’s full of hope, he’s full of wonder until a branch snaps right under him and the air is rushing around him and he’s in free fall and just as he hits the ground his feet root to the concrete below him and the printer shoots out another sheet of paper and

“Is-is your arm doing better?” Connor said, not quite meeting his eyes. There was a point where Evan would be able to dissect every layer to Connor’s voice, but he’s unsure now. He’s not even sure why Connor would talk to him after what happened in the orchard, in the car and the hospital afterwards. A flash of a pair of lips at the corner of his mouth was so heavy he could almost feel it. 

“It’s better,” he said. “Would you - would you sign my cast?”

Connor nodded and accepted the sharpie Evan held out. He wrote slowly, each squeak of the marker and giant stroke that shaped the letters filling the silence more effectively than words could. “No pretending we have other friends, I guess.” He said, a dark note in his tone. The paper still hung loosely in Evan’s grasp.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted for no reason. “For everything. And not…not trying to reconnect.” Connor looked at him and nodded, looking like he was on the verge of saying something but never quite saying it. Finally, he settled on “I’m, um, I’m sorry too, I owe you a giant apology-”

“No you don’t,” Evan assured him, not quite sure he knew what he was saying. He opened his mouth to say more but was left grasping for words as they were all swallowed by the sound of another piece of paper coming from the printer. Connor grabbed it quickly, eyes skimming over it quickly. His face instantly morphed into panic, and he looked up at Evan. He looked down towards his hand, the paper it loosely clenched, and Evan realized those weren’t the words he’d written.

Dear Evan Hansen,

It turns out this wasn’t an amazing day. This won’t be an amazing week, or an amazing year. Because, why would-

Connor made a grab for the paper, swapping the one in his hand for Evan’s. “I think that’s yours,” he said, and Evan was left too blindsided to properly respond. Before he could process Connor was moving away from him again, shoulders hunched without so much as a goodbye.

“Hey-” he started. “I know we lost all this time this summer, but, you know, that doesn’t mean we have to lose more.”

Connor turned back towards him, some foreign expression plastered on his face. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess we don’t.”

“Want to hang out? I have therapy today but after-”

“No, I uh-” Connor moved his hand enclosed around the letter to his pocket. “I can’t hang out tonight.”

There was something odd in the gesture, but Evan couldn’t quite place what it was. “Okay, then. I guess - I’ll see you around?”

Connor nodded, a little too exaggeratedly, before turning on his heal again. Evan looked back down at his own letter, veneered and plastic.

Dear Evan Hansen,

Today may not have been an amazing day, but it was still great because you were at school and you didn’t try to be not you. You had a conversation with Jared, and one with Alana, right? Even if not many people talked to you, you were you. You didn’t try to be anything else. That’s something, I guess.

Sincerely,

Me

Evan pulled away from Connor, immediately feeling the Connor in front of him weaken back into a less real version of him. He reached his hands up to grip Connor’s upper arms.

“Please,” Connor whispered, voice gruff, and as Evan dragged his gaze up to meet his eyes he disappeared entirely, leaving him grasping thin air with his fists and staring into nothing, a phantom touch still lingering on his skin. 

“No,” Evan muttered, hands barely moved a centimeter, eyes straining as though he could find Connor in the space he just disappeared into. “No, Connor, I-”

A sob tore through his chest. One hand reached to just above his heart, and he started the old song and dance of tapping and massaging it, trying to calm it from its unsteady beat. He stumbled up to his feet, reaching for his laptop blindly. It was still open from sending Alana the letter, but he ignored it and navigated to some part he’d entirely forgotten, a little airplane icon in the corner of his desktop. 

Again, he stood in front of the Murphy’s kitchen table. But no one stood there with him. There was just him and a thick stack of papers in his hand, but he didn’t think the Murphy’s noticed that. Not around the sounds of their phones buzzing and beeping. 

Alana had posted his letter. She’d texted him barely thirty seconds later when he’d already been hightailing it to the Murphy’s, a simple if you’d like to know, I posted it. As though feeling the need to justify it, she added hopefully it’s the push we need. If this works maybe it’ll be enough.

The thought of the letter out in the open for everyone to read sent a chill up his spine, but he barely had time to think on it before he was in the eye of the storm, the Murphy’s frantically shooting ideas back and forth to each other. The Connor Project community had turned surprisingly violent with the posting of the letter, and suddenly no one was on the side of the Murphy’s. It was framed as a note that Connor had read on his last day, written by co-president Evan Hansen. Nothing that should force people to turn against each other, but they were, and viciously. Claims that the Murphy’s were exploiting Evan, or forcing him to do something when his mental health was obviously poor. Claims that Evan was manipulating them and forcing his way into the story by faking suicidal thoughts. Threats of violence against the Murphy’s, posting their numbers and their address and supposedly personal claims about how awful they were. 

And Zoe. Zoe, whose phone started ringing the moment he walked in the door, something she’d shut down with a “have fun with your miserable life, bye.” The community seemed torn in two directions with her: a small minority of people who thought that Evan was manipulating and stalking her before their relationship began, putting too much trust into her and unfairly impacting her, and then the large majority of people who blamed her. For what, Evan wasn’t entirely sure. Not seeing Evan before, for not magically giving him more hope like it seems Evan wanted within the words of that page? Her comments were the nastiest. He met her eye from across the kitchen, the corner of his mouth upturned in apology. Her own turned down as if to say it wasn’t his fault, but her eyes were glassier and harder than he would’ve liked. Not hardened for him, but hardened against everything else. He got the unmistakable urge to sweep her up into his arms and try to solve every last one of her problems, or at the very least make her forget about them. Instead, he broke his eyes away from hers, trying to forget the genuine edge of fear in the lines between her forehead. 

In his mind's eye, he saw Connor hurry from the computer lab and somehow through the doors of the kitchen where he stood now. He circled for a moment, stranded in space, before he pulled the note out of his pocket once more. He held it tight, eyes scanning it. Evan removed the same letter from his sweatshirt pocket. Connor hovered nervously over the table before disappearing from his line of sight. 

For the briefest moment, Evan thought he saw Larry jump, eyes fixed to the spot where Connor had been, but a moment later he was sure he had imagined it. 

Cynthia and Zoe’s budding argument brought him back to the present. 

“-tell them, Evan, tell them, you wrote this, you know what it means!”

“I didn’t,” he whispered, eyes dropping again to the note. 

“Don’t, mom. It’s not his job.”

“Evan, please,” Cynthia said. 

“I didn’t. I didn’t write it,” he said again, just a little louder, but it seemed like only Zoe may have even heard him. Their eyes met again, and her frown deepened. He wondered if she could read it off of his face. He wondered, offhandedly, if this was what Connor felt like. If he was dead and gone, and Zoe was the only one who could see him. Is that what that felt like? 

“Evan?” Cynthia said once more. 

“It wasn’t me!” Evan practically shouted. He tossed the letter to the table. The kitchen was silent, then. 

“What do you mean?” Cynthia said, her voice small. 

“I didn’t write the note. He did.”

Larry finally spoke. “He...you mean, he…?”

“Connor wrote the note.” Evan felt tears rising in his throat. “I lied about it being a therapy assignment. I didn’t write the note at all. I wrote, I wrote different letters for myself. But that wasn’t one of them. I didn’t, I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say that he-”

“No,” Cynthia said. She was choked up, her cheeks already turning red. “no, Evan, you wrote this letter, you-”

“But I didn’t,” and here a sob tore through Evan’s chest. “Here-” he tossed the stack of papers onto the table. Zoe reached for them first, her mouth set in a taut line. “We-we emailed. A lot. Secret email accounts. He didn’t,” Evan bit his lip, working through another sob, his hand tapping and massaging his heart again, the other at the hem of his shirt. He was shaking his head, or maybe his head was just shaking. He met Zoe’s eyes. She looked up from the papers. The genuine look of confusion and betrayal in her eyes made him choke a little more. She lifted one hand to her face, brushing over the freckles he knew so well. Her touch was light, and her hand was shaking. He wanted to fix that. He wanted to cross the kitchen and trace her freckles and hold her hand until it no longer shook.  “He didn’t want people to know.”

“He knew you went through his emails,” Zoe said, to either Larry or the table, Evan wasn’t sure. Larry said nothing in return. 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I - those are all of the, all of the emails. And I’m, I just couldn’t, when you came to see me, I couldn’t possibly understand, I had no idea what to, I couldn’t believe - I couldn’t believe that it would be to me .”

He swallowed around another wave of tears. “I couldn’t imagine that he was-” He shook his head. To Zoe, he said “he was there. He got me. When I broke my arm. He was the person.”

“But you said, so you and he, you would-” Zoe finally seemed to be at a loss for words. It made Evan’s heart break. She shook her head, and through his own tears, he could see tears sparkling in her eyes. She let out something akin to a laugh, but a hundred times sadder and smaller. “You loved him, you were-you were best friends, and you were mo-” she cut off. “So he said that about me. Not you.”

Evan nodded. ”Some - some of it, yeah. I heard from him.”

When Zoe’s sob came, it was quiet and pained; her head dropped forward into her arms, emails in her lap.

Cynthia was crying with full abandon now, having snatched up the note. Larry’s head was shaking firmly, and his lips were moving in either a curse or in prayer. 

Again, Evan felt rather than saw Connor’s presence behind him. His sobs came from him in violent bursts, all at once hit with the full force of Connor’s death and the weight of what he’d done. As it slammed into him, just below his throat, he felt the last whisper of a touch against his shoulder. 

“Thank you,” Connor said, for once sounding just like he used to. All of Evan’s breath left his lungs. “Thank you, Evan.”

And with that, Connor was gone for good. His best friend stood, choking out sorry’ s. And his family sat at the table, in various states of distress. A house broken, filled with sniffles and sobs so violent they shook furniture. 

Evan dropped to the tile floor. His head felt dizzy from lack of air. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Zoe’s voice was stretched thin and prone to crack at any moment. When he looked up again, her eyes made his own full with even more tears. They were red and sore looking. She continued, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. “Why didn’t you tell me, Evan?” It was barely more than a whisper, but Evan was sure he would’ve heard her voice across a thousand miles or a million worlds. A tear fell from her right eye. “I killed him. I killed him. They’re right. It’s my fault.”

He shook his head desperately because if nothing else, he needed her to know that it wasn’t her fault. Connor didn’t blame her. 

“Didn’t you hear me before, Zoe?” The words were so choked with tears he would be shocked she could hear them. “You were the one thing. The one thing he could rely on being good. Beyond me, beyond - anything. I wasn’t enough. God, I wasn’t enough. You were. You were everything to him. But he couldn’t, didn’t know how to say it to you. I couldn’t measure up, I couldn’t - couldn’t make him feel okay. I couldn’t blame him for it, Zoe. Because you’re-” another sob racks his words. “You’re perfect. Can’t you see that? He wasn’t blaming you. He couldn’t blame you. It wasn’t you. It was me. It was my fault. It-it was my fault. He was my best friend. It was my job, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it.”

Zoe shook her head. Some hair slipped from behind her ear. “I didn’t see. I couldn’t tell. I-I blamed him . I could’ve—” she cut off, choosing instead to hide back in her arms. 

“Stop,” Cynthia begged. The sound was drawn from her lungs just as it was that day in the principal’s office, pure primal sadness. “Please.”

His entire body shaking with the force of his sobs, he couldn’t help but comply with her request. 

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Larry said. The thickness of his words scared Evan. “We needed to know that. That’s just what we needed.”

Evan shook his head wildly. “I couldn’t let myself know that he was - that I had failed, that he had wanted me to know that. I couldn’t face it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Things fell silent again, but no one left the kitchen. Zoe’s phone dinged again. 

“I’m sorry,” Evan whispered.

“Oh, do you think that the old plane is still down there, Larry?”

“I’d doubt it,” Larry replied. “They probably cleared the whole lake out when they reopened.”

“Is the lake still here, even?”

“I don’t know,” Larry replied. “Shall we check?”

Alana did it, somehow. Maybe it was the push of the letter, or maybe the money would have come to them anyway. Either way, the Connor Murphy Memorial Orchard was a reality at the end of May of that year. With graduation around the corner, Evan and the Murphy’s decided to take a trip together. Heidi was set to show up after her shift ended that afternoon, but until then it was Zoe and Larry and Cynthia back in a place from the past. And Evan, of course. Evan was included in everything to do with Connor, and maybe a little bit more.

Cynthia took Larry’s extended hand and stood to step off of the picnic blanket, following him as he led her towards where Evan supposed the lake used to be. Their hands stayed linked together even as they simply ambled along to their destination. The sight made Evan smile. They were a far cry from the couple in the principal’s office, next to each other but not looking. They seemed like they could finally look each other in the eyes and smile doing it. 

At some point, Evan stood up from the floor. He couldn’t seem to cry anymore. He slid into the seat across from Zoe, the one where the shadow of Connor had been before.

“Where did it happen?” Zoe said. She lifted her head from her arms. Her face was surprisingly blank, as though she was resigned. Though she didn’t clarify, he knew what she was really asking.

“We went to the orchard. Autumn Smile,” he said. “Connor-” he almost choked on the name. “Connor made fun of it. The letters had worn off so it said ‘Aut ile.’” He shook his head. “I don’t know why he thought it was so funny. But he did. And we went inside, even though it was closed down. Insisted we-we climb a tree, and everything. Since it was. Um. My hobby, or so he thought, I guess. And I fell, and he got me. Stayed with me through the hospital, and everything, the whole time. I don’t know what I would’ve done if he weren’t-well.”

“The orchard,” Cynthia whispered. The tear tracks on her face glistened. She stood suddenly and surged towards Evan, and for one ridiculous moment, he thought she might hit him. She had every right to, in his mind. But he couldn’t have been more wrong. She wrapped him in a hug so motherly he felt tears resurge in his eyes. 

Of course, later, he’d go home and receive a hug like that from his own mother. He’d explain the full truth of everything, and she’d apologize and he’d apologize and he’d finally stop pushing her away. But for then, receiving a hug like that from Connor’s mother was enough to make the pain of loss feel so new and raw that it was like that unadulterated feeling in the principal’s office, the one that choked him until he forced out a lie. It scared him, but he couldn’t ignore the part of him that said he deserved to be afraid. 

Wrapped up in that hug, along with all of the new grief and gratitude and relief in Cynthia’s sob, it felt like a bit of forgiveness, maybe. Like it could become forgiveness. 

Zoe reached out to him while her parents talked and began to amble away, and her fingers brushed the back of his hand. He turned his hand automatically, lacing his fingers with hers. She squeezed his hand gently, and he squeezed hers back. 

“They were talking today about how they want to come back for stuff like this,” she said, her voice low to ensure her parents didn’t hear. They probably wouldn’t have heard around their ensuing chatter, anyway. “I think this might be the best thing for them yet.”

Evan shrugged. “I hope.” He squeezed her fingers. “I’m glad to be here with you.”

She smiled, one of her thousand-watt smiles that always filled his chest with a kind of warmth. From further away, he could hear Cynthia giggle, happier than he’d ever heard her. The sun warmed his cheeks and his knuckles where his hand lay intertwined with Zoe’s. It had been a far from easy journey to get there, but he thought it was worth it. The last months had been new, different, painful in a previously unknown way. But with the truth out, he could finally grieve properly. Learning to do that, with his mother, with the Murphy’s, with Zoe was more of a gift than he could have possibly given them.

Zoe leaned her head onto his shoulder. “Me, too,” she whispered, and he knew she was telling the truth.

He closed his eyes against the light as he had on stage all those months before. But the light seemed to ebb through him anyway, leaving him feeling nothing but content. Of course, nothing was perfect. His trust with the Murphy’s may not have been completely rebuilt, nor would it ever probably be. He still felt an emptiness directly to his right, in the pit of his chest, on the edge of his shoulder where a black-polished hand used to lie (and at the corner of his mouth where a pair of lips had once, ever so briefly, ever so destructively, brushed under a hot summer sun, that had driven them apart), but it was far from the gaping hole it had been when he'd convinced himself it hadn’t existed. His mother had fewer shifts and he attempted to communicate more, but they still only really connected once a week at most. He and Jared and Alana had finally begun working together again, but all their conversations were a little awkward and uncertain. And he and Zoe, though they touched at the hand and the head and shoulder, were stuck like that indefinitely, despite conversations and attempts at more or at less. 

He didn’t need perfect, however. Better - better was more than fine. He’d convinced himself, once, that he only needed one thing or one person to feel like enough. He might’ve been right, but maybe what he needed was several things, several people and several experiences. Not whole things and not half things, either, but things and relationships and experiences that were slowly, steadily, always growing better and stronger. Marching on towards better, into the sunlight dipping over the horizon. A possibility of new growth and a possibility of dead ends were both fine to him, and the possibility that it might stay the way it was then, in a park with people he cared about deeply - people who cared about him despite all of his flaws and mistakes and pushed him to do better in the future - didn’t scare him at all. It was better than he’d ever hoped for. (Except for the idea that Connor was truly gone forever. He would’ve given anything to change that.)

Zoe squeezed his hand, and he smiled against the sun, thinking he might just disappear into that feeling.