At the gates of Disneyland, Ethan Cole handed Chloe Parker a ticket, scanned his own, and started toward the entrance before he remembered I was standing three feet behind them. “You got yours, right, Scarlett?” he called over his shoulder, as if I had been the one who forgot something. By the time I bought a single-day ticket on my phone, the two people I loved most had already disappeared into the crowd.

Chapter 2

I went to the Getty Center because I needed proof that I could spend one day without chasing Ethan and Chloe. At noon, Ethan texted that they were meeting an old classmate for lunch and would see me later downtown. “Have fun on your own,” he added, as though being alone had been my choice.

That evening, I watched them share drinks without asking, trading sips with the unconscious ease of people who had practiced intimacy when no one was looking. I slowed down, and a man turning through the crowd slammed into me. My iced coffee flew across my shirt, his phone hit the pavement, and before I could speak, he seized my arm and demanded that I pay for the shattered screen.

I called Ethan’s name. He was twenty yards away, helping Chloe argue with a vendor over a declined card, and for one heartbeat our eyes met. The stranger shoved me, my injured leg folded under me, and white-hot pain ripped through my ankle as Ethan looked away and followed Chloe around the corner.

A bystander called the police. Hours later, after I gave a statement, I limped into the hotel and found Ethan waiting with ice packs and pain spray. He knelt in front of me with such practiced gentleness that once, years earlier, it would have felt like love.

“You saw me,” I said.

His hands stopped. “I saw you standing there. I didn’t know you were in trouble. Chloe was having a problem with the vendor, and I was trying to get her away before things got worse.”

Chloe sat nearby eating a caramel apple. “Scar, you really have to watch where you’re going in crowds,” she said, and Ethan actually laughed. Something inside me went cold enough to feel clean.

“If I am never your first choice,” I told him, “stop pretending I’m your girlfriend.”

He stood and his expression changed from concern to irritation. “So your problem matters and hers doesn’t?” he asked. “We agreed to stay together on this trip, and you’re the one who keeps making everything difficult.”

I packed the rest of my suitcase. In the group chat, Chloe posted the first photograph from the entire trip that included me, then wrote that if her presence bothered me so much she would buy a ticket home. Ethan answered within seconds: “I don’t want you to.”

That simple sentence ended whatever uncertainty remained. Months earlier, Ethan had accidentally knocked Chloe off her bicycle, and her head injury had required surgery. Even after doctors said the accident was not his fault, he carried his guilt like a private debt, and Chloe learned that all she had to do was look wounded for him to pay it.

Then she posted the couples-photo pictures. Our high school friends filled the comments with hearts and congratulations, so I pressed “like” and wrote, “You two make a perfect couple.” Less than a minute later, Ethan pounded on my door and stormed in, furious because Chloe had seen my comment, cried, and run away.

I searched for her because, even then, twelve years of friendship were hard to kill. My ankle throbbed while I checked the lobby, the parking garage, nearby sidewalks, and every place I thought she might go. Just before dawn, I opened Ethan’s room and found empty bottles on the floor, Chloe asleep against him on the couch, his arm wrapped around her waist.

I lost control. I struck them with a pillow, crying more from humiliation than anger, and demanded to know whether either of them understood what it felt like to be abandoned on unfamiliar streets. Chloe reached for me, and when I knocked her hand away, a red mark rose on her cheek.

Ethan shoved my arm aside. “If you hate being around us so much, then leave,” he snapped. “Walk out that door, and everything we promised each other is over.”

I laughed because there was nothing left to save. “You’re sleeping with her in your arms, Ethan. Don’t act like I’m the one ending something real.”

My mother met me at the airport and drove straight to urgent care. An orthopedic specialist said the repeated strain had turned a manageable injury into an Achilles tendon rupture. Surgery could help, but I might always have a slight limp.

I cried harder for that than I had for Ethan. A boyfriend could become a stranger, but my body might remember that trip every time I crossed a room. While my mother held my hand, Chloe posted that Ethan wanted her at a community college near Columbia so the three of us could “all be together again.”

I left the chat.

Three days later, one of our classmates sent me a video Chloe had posted from Griffith Observatory. Ethan stood in the evening light holding sunflowers, the flowers he had once promised to bring me when he finally asked me out properly. “Chloe,” he said in the video, smiling the tender smile I had spent years waiting to see, “I lost the bet. Want to be my girlfriend?”

She said yes.

Later, Ethan messaged me that it was only for three months because of a stupid wager, and that after the bet ended he would “reach out.” He warned me not to come around too much at Columbia because he did not want Chloe upset. I read the message from a seat on a plane headed east.

By the time he decided I would forgive him, I was already on my way to Boston.