I checked my phone again at the arrivals gate.

The message was still there. I'd read it so many times the words had stopped looking like words.

*I keep thinking about what you said last week. About how you always save the window seat for me on road trips. I don't think you know what that does to me, Lea.*

Garrett had sent that four days ago. I'd read it in the library, between a stack of flashcards and a cold cup of coffee, and I'd had to press my hand flat against the table just to stay in my seat.

Ten years. Ten years of being the girl who waited, who made herself smaller, who laughed at the right moments and never asked for too much. And then, three months ago, the messages started changing. They got softer. More specific. The kind of specific that means someone has been paying attention.

I told myself not to read too much into it. I told myself that a hundred times.

I read it again anyway.

The arrivals board flipped. London Heathrow, landed. I smoothed the front of my jacket — navy, the one Bailee said made me look like I had my life together — and watched the doors.

He came through with a rolling carry-on and a tan that London had no business giving him. Tall, easy in his body, the kind of person a room notices. Garrett Johnston, exactly as I'd carried him in my head for a decade.

He saw me and smiled. Not the big smile. The small one, the one I used to think was just for me.

'Hey, you.' He pulled me into a one-armed hug, the kind that ends before you're ready. 'You didn't have to come all the way out here.'

'I wanted to,' I said.

He was already looking at his phone.

---

The cab smelled like pine air freshener and old leather. Garrett sat beside me scrolling through something, and I sat with my hands in my lap and watched the highway unspool toward the city. The skyline came up slow and gray and enormous, the way it always does, like it's reminding you of your size.

I took out my phone and opened the messages again.

*You're the only person I've ever been able to just sit with. You know that?*

He'd sent that one on a Tuesday. I'd been in the middle of a study session with Soren — Bailee's cousin, who'd been quietly helping me prep for finals for the past few months — and I'd had to excuse myself to the hallway just to breathe.

I glanced at Garrett. He was still on his phone. His jaw was relaxed. He looked like a man with nothing on his mind.

'You seem good,' I said.

'Yeah.' He didn't look up. 'London was good.'

I turned back to the window. The pine air freshener was too sweet. I cracked the window an inch and watched the city get closer.

---

The restaurant was loud and warm and smelled like sesame and charcoal. A trendy Korean BBQ spot in Koreatown — Garrett had picked it, texted me the address an hour before his flight landed. The kind of place with exposed brick and low lighting and a grill built into every table.

She was already there.

I didn't know who she was at first. Just a woman at the table, dark-haired, with the particular posture of someone who has decided in advance that she is the most interesting person in the room. She looked up when we walked in and smiled at Garrett with the ease of someone who had been waiting for him, not us.

'Lea,' Garrett said, pulling out a chair, 'this is Francesca.'

Francesca Holmes extended her hand across the table. Her nails were perfect. Her smile had something behind it I couldn't name yet.

'I've heard so much about you,' she said.

The meat went on the grill. The conversation moved around me — London, a gallery they'd visited, someone named Oliver who was apparently hilarious. I ate and nodded and tried to locate the feeling I'd had at the arrivals gate, the one that had felt so close to certainty.

Garrett sat relaxed and distant, chopsticks in hand, laughing at something Francesca said. He hadn't looked at me directly since we sat down.

Francesca leaned forward.

'Can I ask you something, Lea?' Her voice was light. Conversational. 'How long have you been texting Garrett?'

I looked at her. 'A few months, I guess. Since September.'

'Mm.' She tilted her head. 'And what did you think of his messages? The sweet ones.'

Something cold moved through my chest.

'They were—' I stopped. 'They were really—'

'Because those were me.' She said it the way you'd say *pass the salt.* 'His old phone. I found it in a drawer back in October and thought, why not? We called it the Childhood Friend Takedown.' She smiled. 'You were very easy to string along, honestly. You wanted it so badly.'

The grill hissed. Someone at the next table laughed.

I looked at Garrett.

He was looking at the grill. Chopsticks still in his hand. His face was completely, perfectly still.

He didn't look up.

---

I stood up. My chair scraped back and I didn't care.

'Ten years.' My voice came out steadier than I expected. 'I spent ten years loving someone who never existed. And you—' I looked at Garrett, and he finally looked at me, and there was nothing there, just a faint discomfort, like I was a scene he wanted to be over. 'You sat there. You just sat there.'

He opened his mouth.

'Don't.' I picked up my bag. 'I don't know you. I don't think I ever did.'

I walked out.

The cold hit me on the sidewalk like a wall. Manhattan kept moving — cabs, voices, someone's music bleeding from a window above — and I stood on the pavement and felt the ground tilt slightly under my feet.

My legs were shaking. I pressed my back against the brick and looked up at the sky, which was the particular orange-gray of a city night, and tried to remember how to breathe.

A car pulled up to the curb.

The door opened and Soren Edwards stepped out.

I knew him as Bailee's cousin. The quiet one who showed up at our apartment with textbooks and never stayed longer than the work required. The one who never rushed me when I was thinking, who asked follow-up questions about things I'd already forgotten I'd mentioned. I'd never once wondered why he was always exactly where I needed him to be.

He didn't ask what happened. He looked at me once — just once, the way you look at something you already understand — and then he turned and positioned himself between me and the restaurant door with a stillness that took up more space than it should have.

Behind me, I heard the door open. Garrett's voice: 'Lea—'

Soren turned his head. He didn't say anything. He just looked at Garrett with a calm so complete it had weight to it, and Garrett stopped talking.

Soren opened the passenger door.

I got in.

The city moved past the windows. My hands were in my lap. I was still shaking, finely, the way you shake when the adrenaline has nowhere left to go.

'You don't have to talk,' Soren said.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes.

For the first time in ten years, I let someone else hold the weight.

---

Bailee was awake when I got back.

The room was quiet. The overhead light was off, just the lamp on her desk, and there was a mug of tea on my nightstand that was still steaming. She looked up when I came in and didn't say anything, which was the kindest thing she could have done.

I sat on my bed.

I opened the messages.

*I keep thinking about what you said last week.*

I read it again. And again. My thumb kept scrolling up, compulsive and sick, looking for the seam — the moment where I should have known, where the warmth had a crack in it if I'd only looked.

My phone buzzed. Garrett's name.

Then again. Then again.

Bailee reached over without a word and turned my phone face-down on the nightstand. She sat beside me on the bed, close enough that our shoulders touched, and looked at the wall with me.

Outside, the city made its sounds. Somewhere below, a cab horn. A siren, far away, getting farther.

I didn't cry. I just sat there and felt the shape of ten years, and how small it looked now that I could finally see all of it at once.

I stared at my phone for the third time that morning. The screen stayed dark. No new messages. I set it face-down on my desk and tried to focus on the textbook in front of me, but the words blurred together like watercolors in the rain.

Bailee's phone buzzed from her side of the room. She glanced at it, her expression tightening for just a moment before she tucked it into her pocket. She'd been doing that a lot since the restaurant. Counting the buzzes, I realized there had been at least six since I'd woken up.

'Do you want me to turn it off?' Bailee asked, catching me watching her.

I shook my head. 'He's going to keep texting anyway.'

She nodded and went back to her notes. We both knew what the texts said. I didn't need to see them to know they were following the pattern—casual at first, then defensive, then wounded. The entitled disbelief of someone who had never been told no.

My phone buzzed. I flinched. Bailee reached over and picked it up before I could.

'He says you're overreacting,' she said quietly, reading the screen. 'That it was all Francesca's idea and he never meant for it to go this far.' Her thumb hovered over the delete button.

I looked at her. 'You don't have to do that.'

'I know.' She deleted it anyway. 'But you don't need to see them.'

The buzzing continued. Each time, Bailee would check the message, her jaw tightening, and then delete it without reading it aloud. I didn't ask what the later ones said. I didn't want to know if they were getting more desperate, more entitled, more convinced that I owed him my forgiveness.

I was grateful she never asked me to stop her.

* * *

The library felt different on Tuesday. The same tables, the same fluorescent lights, the same smell of old paper and industrial cleaner. But I felt like a different person walking through the familiar stacks.

I was twenty minutes late. I'd almost turned around three times on the walk over—convincing myself I was too tired, too raw, too anything to face even the quiet routine of study session. But something pulled me forward. Maybe it was the thought of letting Garrett take this from me too.

Soren was already there, sitting in the same chair he always took, the one with the best light from the window. He had the same textbook open to the same chapter we'd been working through last week, as if nothing had changed. As if my entire world hadn't tilted off its axis.

He looked up when I sat down. His eyes were the same—calm, present, asking nothing. He didn't say, 'How are you?' or 'I heard what happened.' He just nodded once, the way he always did when I arrived, and slid his notes across the table.

'We left off on chapter fourteen,' he said.

I stared at the notes. They were neat, organized, with color-coded highlights and margins full of additional examples. He'd clearly prepared them before knowing whether I'd show up at all.

'Thank you,' I said. My voice sounded strange to my own ears.

He nodded again and opened his own book. 'We can start with the protein synthesis pathways if that makes sense.'

I opened my textbook. The pages were familiar. The work was familiar. For the first time in days, something felt solid.

* * *

I started taking the long way to my classes. The route through the humanities quad added ten minutes to my commute, but it meant avoiding the main walkway where Garrett liked to sit on the benches with his friends. I started eating lunch at the coffee shop on the edge of campus, where the tables were small and tucked into corners, instead of the dining hall with its open seating and constant movement.

I skipped Professor Chen's lecture on Thursday. Garrett and I shared that class—had shared it, I corrected myself. We'd never actually spoken much during it, but knowing he was somewhere in that room, maybe watching me, maybe talking about me, felt unbearable.

I told myself I was being rational. That I was taking care of myself. But the truth was, I was shrinking again, making myself smaller, avoiding the spaces where I might be seen.

Soren noticed. Of course he noticed.

The first time, I was leaving the library late, the heavy evening air settling over the campus like a blanket. I was walking toward the math building to grab my mail when I heard footsteps behind me.

'Same route tomorrow?' Soren's voice was quiet, steady.

I turned. He was a few steps back, hands in his pockets, looking at me with that careful attention I'd grown used to.

'I didn't know you were behind me,' I said.

'I wasn't until just now.' He fell into step beside me. 'I have a meeting in the math building tomorrow. Seven-thirty?'

It wasn't a question that needed an answer. It was an offer, wrapped in something that looked like coincidence.

The next morning, he was there, leaning against the railing outside my dorm, scrolling through something on his phone. He looked up when he saw me and straightened.

'Good morning,' he said, as if this was normal. As if he always waited for people outside their dorms at seven-thirty in the morning.

'Good morning,' I replied, and we walked together across the quiet campus.

He never mentioned why he was suddenly walking with me. He never said, 'I know what happened, let me help.' He just appeared, consistently, reliably, until the sight of him became something I expected, something I counted on.

And slowly, I stopped taking the long way.

Wednesday afternoons, the coffee shop on the edge of campus was mine. That was the deal I'd made with myself — one corner, one table, the one by the radiator that clicked and hissed but kept the cold out. Nobody from my usual orbit came here. That was the point.

Soren was already at the table when I arrived. He had his laptop open and a second coffee sitting across from him, still steaming. He didn't look up when I sat down, just slid my cup toward me and said, 'The intro paragraph is burying the argument. You want it in the first three sentences, not the fifth.'

I pulled out my draft. 'Good morning to you too.'

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost.

We worked like that for a while — him reading, me revising, the radiator doing its thing. Outside, the sky was the flat white of a November that hadn't decided whether to snow yet. I was in the middle of rewriting my thesis sentence when the door opened and the cold came in with it.

I felt it before I saw him. Some old reflex, ten years in the making.

Garrett scanned the room. His eyes found me the way they always had — like I was a landmark, something fixed and reliable. He started toward the table.

Soren didn't look up. He turned a page in my draft and made a small mark in the margin. 'This transition,' he said, tapping the paragraph, 'is doing too much work. Split it.'

I looked at the paragraph. I looked at Garrett, who had slowed, who was reading the situation — Soren's complete indifference, my attention on the page, the absence of any opening he could step into.

I looked back at the paragraph.

'Here?' I asked, pointing.

'One sentence earlier,' Soren said.

I made the cut. The paragraph breathed better immediately. I could feel Garrett standing somewhere behind me, waiting for me to turn around, waiting for the moment I'd acknowledge him and give him the foothold he needed.

The moment didn't come.

After a while — I didn't count the minutes — I heard the door open again. The cold came in, then went.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

Soren turned another page. He didn't say anything about what had just happened. He didn't have to.

Something shifted in my chest, quiet and specific. The realization that I didn't have to manage this alone. That I hadn't been, for a while now, without fully understanding it.

* * *

Thursday morning, I came out of Professor Chen's lecture into the gray November air and Garrett was there.

He fell into step beside me like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like we were still the people we used to be, walking across campus together, and the restaurant had never happened.

'Hey.' His voice was warm. The warm version, the one I used to save up like currency. 'I've been trying to reach you.'

I kept walking.

'Lea.' He adjusted his pace to match mine. 'I know you're angry. You have every right to be. But Francesca — she took it further than I ever wanted. I didn't know she was going to do it like that, in public, I didn't—'

The path curved toward the library. I followed the curve.

'I miss you,' he said. 'I miss talking to you. I miss how things were.'

How things were. I turned that over in my mind as I walked. How things were: me waiting, me shrinking, me reading the same message seventeen times looking for proof that I mattered. How things were: him looking at the grill while Francesca took me apart piece by piece.

He was still talking. Something about how long we'd known each other, how that had to count for something, how he'd been doing a lot of thinking.

'I have a session,' I said.

I turned toward the library steps.

Behind me, I heard him stop. I didn't turn around. I went up the steps and through the door and into the warm paper-smell of the building, and I didn't look back.

But I knew what I'd see if I did. I'd seen it in the half-second before I turned: Garrett standing in the middle of the path, the warm version of his face gone, replaced by something I'd never seen on him before.

Uncertainty. Real uncertainty, not performed.

I filed it away and kept walking.

* * *

The library was quiet at that hour. We had our usual table, the one near the window with the afternoon light that came in at an angle and made everything look slightly warmer than it was.

We'd been working for maybe an hour when I asked it. I hadn't planned to. It just came out, careful and tentative, like I was testing whether the question was allowed.

'Why don't you ever seem rattled by anything?'

Soren looked up from his notes. He didn't answer right away. He set his pen down and looked at the window for a moment, at the flat white sky.

'There was a butterfly,' he said. 'A morpho. I was repairing it — the wing had a fracture along the discal cell, very fine, the kind you can only fix with the right adhesive and a lot of patience.' He paused. 'My family moved unexpectedly. I had to leave it mid-repair. I left it on a shelf at my uncle's house, still broken, and I thought about it for a long time afterward.'

I watched his face. There was something careful in it, something he was holding at a specific distance.

'What happened to it?' I asked.

'Someone repaired it.' He picked up his pen again. 'The right person, at the right time. Better than I would have, I think.' He looked at me. 'I learned that forcing the process ruins it. Some things need to wait for the right hands.'

I sat with that for a moment.

I'd spent ten years apologizing for how long things took me. For being a beat behind, for needing the question twice, for processing at my own unhurried pace while the world moved on without waiting.

Some things need to wait for the right hands.

I didn't say anything. I just opened my notebook and went back to work.

But I stopped apologizing. Not out loud — I hadn't been doing it out loud for a while. I stopped doing it in the quiet place inside myself where I kept the running tally of all the ways I was too slow, too much, not enough.

I just stopped.

Outside, the flat white sky held its breath. The afternoon light came through the window at its angle and made everything look slightly warmer than it was.

I wrote three pages without stopping once to doubt them.