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 3

My mother later told me Ethan appeared at our house with a suitcase, expecting to pick me up for Columbia as if nothing had changed. When she said I had gone to Harvard, he called it spite. She answered, “Have you ever cared about Scarlett’s future as much as you cared about Chloe’s feelings?”

She also told him about the specialists, the surgery, and the possibility that I would limp for the rest of my life. For the first time, apparently, he stopped arguing. He called me six times that afternoon, but I did not answer.

Near the end of August, his mother phoned. She sounded exhausted and asked if I would please speak to Ethan because he had flown to Boston without telling anyone and refused to come home until he saw me. I agreed only because she had always been kind to me.

We met outside the campus gates in a thin summer rain. He looked thinner than he had in California, and when I handed him my spare umbrella, relief softened his whole face. “Scarlett, just listen. I came to apologize.”

He promised Six Flags, a harbor Ferris wheel, sunflowers, and the romantic confession I had once wanted. Then he said, with astonishing confidence, “Your enrollment at Columbia is probably still open. Drop Harvard and come back. We can still spend all four years together.”

I looked at him and finally saw the thing I had mistaken for steadiness. It was certainty—not in me, but in his belief that I would always rearrange my life around him. “I chose Harvard because it is better for me,” I said. “I want to prepare for dental school, train at the highest level I can, and build a life that does not depend on who I’m dating.”

“You were going to Columbia in July.”

“Yes,” I said. “Because of you.”

Rain collected along the edge of his umbrella. I told him the truth without raising my voice: California had not made me choose Harvard out of anger; it had removed the one reason I had been willing to choose Columbia against my better judgment. “You didn’t break my heart in one big moment, Ethan. You left me a hundred little times until there was nothing left to come back to.”

He apologized then, and for once he did not defend himself. He admitted Chloe had been easier for him because she always made her wants obvious, while I had swallowed mine until they came out as hurt. He said he had started seeing me through Chloe’s complaints, and he promised to end whatever existed between them.

“That’s between you and Chloe now,” I said. “It has nothing to do with me.”

I turned toward campus, but our old class group chat suddenly exploded. Chloe was reminding Ethan that they had an appointment with a landlord to look at an apartment near her school. Friends joked that they were practically married already, and Ethan, humiliated, typed that they had never really been dating and that the whole thing had been a joke.

Chloe immediately answered that he was only in Boston because I had asked him to come “clear his head.” Then she thanked me publicly for “looking after her boyfriend.” After twelve years of protecting her from embarrassment, I was done protecting her from the truth.

I recorded a voice message. I reminded her that we had been friends since grade school, that she had once been the first child to invite me into a club when I was shy and lonely, and that I had loved her like family. I also told her that somewhere along the way, competition had replaced affection, and every photograph she took with Ethan became a little victory because it proved she could make me disappear.

“You’re not my friend anymore,” I said. “And if you want Ethan, come get him. I’m not competing for him.”

Her answer came through tears. She called me the lucky one: an only child with supportive parents, tutors, money, and choices. She said her parents had treated her brain surgery like an expense they resented, and Ethan’s guilt was the only reason anyone put her first. Then she crossed a line I had not expected.

She told the whole group that my SAT tutor had “predicted” so many test topics that maybe my scores were not legitimate.

By morning, the rumor had reached our high school.

Principal Carter called me home for a formal meeting.