Chapter 3

That day, Sabrina stayed the night at my place.

I had a dream about the past, back when I first encountered Sabrina in seventh grade.

The teacher said her grades were too low, so I was assigned to help her with her schoolwork.

She would sleep in class and go wild the second the bell rang. Every time I tried to help her with her studies, she would unapologetically slack off.

"Come on, I'm really not meant for studying. You go ahead and build a better future for us all, and I'll just be a happy little slacker. Who knows, I might just meet someone tall, rich, and handsome who's willing to take care of me for the rest of my life?"

I was really annoyed with her back then.

However, during the winter of my high school freshman year, I lost both my parents in an accident. I was depressed, and I couldn't focus on work at all.

Sabrina somehow caught wind of it, and every day, she would pass me a small carton of milk without fail. Sometimes, the milk came with a note written in crooked handwriting. "Cheer up! You have a future to build!"

Every Christmas, she didn't want me to spend the day alone, so she dragged me over to her home to join in the festivities. She also had her parents get me a Christmas gift and saved me a place at their dinner table.

I felt like I was too much trouble for them, but Sabrina just smiled innocently as she urged me to stay. "My parents are always complaining about my bad grades, so now that I've brought home a genius daughter for them, they're over the moon!"

She was stupid and rash, but the warmth she had given me was real, too.

The dream shifted and blurred, taking me back to my junior year.

Shane had first met Sabrina at the cafe right outside the back entrance of the campus.

Sabrina had just gone through a breakup, and she had come over to look for a shoulder to cry on. I was still in class back then, so I asked Shane to help me look after her.

"You've always loved helping others, right? Well, my best friend came over, and she's crying because she just went through a breakup. I'm still in class, so I can't meet up with her right now.

"Can you please check in on her at the cafe? You know how silly she is sometimes, so you might have to work harder to calm her down."

He joked, "How generous you are, giving away your boyfriend just like that!"

Now that I thought about it, that was probably the last warning I got.

But back then, being the young woman I was, I just smiled and said, "You two are the most important people to me in this world. If I still have to worry about that, I'll have lived my life in vain."

I heard that when Shane arrived at the cafe that day, he ordered a mug of hot cocoa for Sabrina.

Sabrina was sniffling as she looked up. She asked through her tears, "Men are so evil. Why would he date me and then get upset at me for being stupid? And who are you? Why are you so nice to me?"

Shane was slightly taken aback for a moment.

He might have intended to come over just to keep his promise to me, but when he met Sabrina, he sat down in front of her and said in a calm tone, "I'm just a nice passerby. If you keep crying like that, they'll think I bullied you or something."

Sabrina laughed at his words. Then, she started to joke around with him. "Stupid poker face!"

Later on, when I hurried to the cafe, I was even amazed at how nice my boyfriend was for being so gentle to a complete stranger.

Now that I thought about it, he was a white knight who had just encountered the adorable and naive woman he wanted to protect.

At that exact moment in time, everything had started unraveling.