My professor thought three little words would reveal something about our families. She had no idea those words were about to cost me the only family I had left.
Chapter 1
“Text your parents, ‘I love you,’” Professor Greene said, walking between the rows of our psychology lecture hall. “Then write down their first response. Don’t coach them. Don’t explain. Just observe.”
Around me, phones appeared instantly. One girl laughed when her mother replied with six heart emojis. A guy behind me groaned because his father answered, What did you wreck?
I stared at the empty message box on my screen.
My mother and father had been dead for twelve years.
After the accident, their closest friend, Julian Vance, became my legal guardian. He had been thirty-two then, a rising executive with no children and no idea what to do with a terrified eight-year-old girl. Somehow, he learned. He packed school lunches badly, sat through dance recitals he didn’t understand, helped with algebra he pretended to remember, and once drove across Chicago in a snowstorm because I had a fever and wanted the strawberry candies my mother used to buy.
He was not my father. He was not my uncle, despite the affectionate title I had used as a child. He was simply Julian, the man who had stayed when everyone else had gone.
So I typed the words to him.
I love you.
Then I watched the little typing bubble appear.
Disappear.
Appear again.
For nearly two hours, nothing came.
Finally, my phone buzzed.
Hazel, don’t start having thoughts you shouldn’t have.
I read it twice before my face went hot.
The next day, he blocked me on social media. A week later, his assistant stopped returning my calls. When I went to Vance Group headquarters to ask what I had done wrong, a security officer I had known since high school stepped awkwardly in front of the turnstile.
“I’m sorry, Miss Carter.”
“Since when do you call me Miss Carter?”
He looked miserable. “Mr. Vance left instructions.”
“What instructions?”
The officer glanced toward the marble lobby as if hoping the floor would swallow him.
“You’re not to be admitted.”
That was how six months of silence began.
If Julian saw me at the house, he found another room. If I entered the kitchen, he suddenly remembered a call. When I asked whether we could talk, he answered with clipped politeness until, one evening, his patience finally broke.
“Hazel, have some dignity,” he said. “Stop clinging to me.”
Those words accomplished what all his locked doors had not.
I stopped.
By February, another problem had become harder to ignore. I had been coughing for weeks. Then came dizziness, exhaustion, and strange gaps in my memory. One morning I found my car keys in the refrigerator and had no memory of putting them there.
Dr. Samuel Miller ordered scans.
He studied them for a long time before looking at me.
“Hazel, there’s a mass in your left lung.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Further tests brought worse news. The cancer had spread, including a lesion in my brain that likely explained the memory problems. An experimental surgical team in Switzerland was willing to evaluate me, but no one used the word cure.
I didn’t tell Julian.
By then, he was engaged to Victoria Lane, a television journalist who was graceful, successful, and composed in every photograph. Julian had arranged a blind date for me with Tristan Hale, the son of one of his business associates, apparently hoping I would develop an appropriate relationship of my own.
I agreed because, strangely, it made Julian kinder.
The first time he asked how things were going with Tristan, we were standing in my bedroom while I sorted clothes into boxes.
“How serious is it?” Julian asked. “Should I expect a wedding invitation?”
His voice almost sounded like the old Julian.
I clung to that scrap of warmth.
“We’re planning everything,” I lied.
His expression tightened. “Everything?”
“Lavender everywhere. It’s always been my favorite.” I smiled too brightly. “And maybe a purple diamond ring shaped like a lavender blossom.”
The longer I talked, the darker his expression became.
Finally he interrupted. “Hazel.”
I stopped.
“No matter who you marry, I will always care about you. You know that, don’t you?”
The words should have comforted me. Instead, they felt like flowers placed on a grave.
He glanced around my half-empty room. “Have you moved the rest to Tristan’s place?”
“No.”
“I can have replacements bought.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
He frowned.
I closed the lid of a suitcase.
“I probably won’t be living here again.”
What I didn’t tell him was that most of my belongings had already been shipped to Zurich.
I was leaving in three days.
On the morning of Julian’s wedding.
