Se connecterHazel's POV People always think the biggest battles happen in public.They don't.The hardest ones happen inside us—the ones no one applauds, the ones that leave no visible bruises.Healing isn't a single moment. It's a thousand quiet choices made after the worst has already happened.It had been several weeks since I walked out of the detention center and closed the door on the life I'd known as Hazel Pierce.I didn't choose that because I'd forgotten everything or because it had suddenly stopped hurting. I did because, somewhere along the way, I'd stopped letting my past decide who I was allowed to become.Life had quietly found its rhythm again.Final exams came and went. The endless campus gossip finally found someone else to obsess over, proving what I'd once thought impossible that even the loudest scandals eventually became yesterday's news.Now the university buzzed with a different kind of excitement.Graduation.Blue banners fluttered from the lamp posts. Families wandered
Hazel’s POVI barely slept all night. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw two men.One had spent eighteen years searching for me. The other had spent eighteen years raising me.Somewhere between them, I had lost myself. By morning, I already knew what I had to do.I found Oswald in the dinning, a mug of coffee untouched in front of him. He looked up the moment I walked in, as though he'd been expecting me."You're leaving."I nodded."I'll come with you."I shook my head.“I should do this alone,” I told him. “This isn’t about Rebecca Sterling. This is about saying goodbye to the man who raised Hazel Pierce.”He nodded, understanding immediately, and didn’t try to talk me out of it.The detention center was just as lonely as I expected. After signing in and surrendering my phone, an officer led me down a narrow hallway before stopping outside a small visitation room. "You'll have thirty minutes," the officer said before stepping outside.Rivers was already sitting at the table, as I t
Hazel’s POVThe campus didn’t stop celebrating for hours.Students poured out of dorms and into the quad, banners waving, someone’s car blasting music from the parking lot near the rink. I stood at the edge of it all for a while, watching Jaxon get lifted onto his teammates’ shoulders, his grin wide enough that it made my own face hurt from smiling back at him from a distance.It was strange, watching it from outside the chaos instead of inside it for once.A few months ago, this entire campus had felt like a battlefield. The blog, the scandal, the fake relationship that had somehow turned real in the middle of everything else falling apart. Now I stood at the edge of a championship celebration with the weight of an entirely different life sitting on my shoulders.We had both come so far. Further than either of us had any right to expect, given how this had all started.I let myself watch him a little longer before turning back toward the dorms.Sasha was waiting on her bed when I wal
Jaxon’s POVThe locker room felt different before this game than it had before any other.Usually, there was noise, music, trash talk, and someone tapping their stick against the floor out of nervous energy. Today there was just the low hum of guys getting ready in silence, everyone aware of everything that had happened over the past week without anyone saying it out loud. Rivers in custody. Trey was suspended, sitting at home instead of in the locker room with the rest of us. The team that had spent the whole season building toward this game was walking into it cracked down the middle.Coach gathered us before warm-ups, standing in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking at each of us in turn.“I’m not going to pretend this week hasn’t been hard. Some of you are worried about Trey. Some of you don’t know what to feel about any of it. That’s fair. But here’s what I need you to understand before we walk out on that ice today. Championships aren’t won by the most t
Hazel’s POV“What is happening?” Trey asked again, slower this time, his eyes moving between Oswald’s still expression and Rivers’ stricken one.Nobody answered immediately.“Someone needs to explain this. Right now.”I was the one who finally spoke. “Trey, I’m not Hazel Pierce.”He stared at me like I had said something in a language he didn’t recognize. “What?”“My name isn’t Hazel Pierce.” I gestured at the documents still scattered across the coffee table. “It’s Rebecca Sterling. I’m his daughter.” I nodded toward Oswald. “The girl everyone thought died eighteen years ago.”Trey laughed, short and disbelieving, the kind of laugh that comes out when your brain hasn’t caught up to what your ears just heard. “That’s not… that’s insane. This is some kind of joke.” He turned to Oswald. “Did you put this idea in her head? Is this some kind of manipulation to get to whatever’s left of our family’s money?”“Trey…” I started.“No,” Oswald said calmly, cutting in before I could finish. “I u
Hazel’s POVI didn’t knock when I got to the house.I just walked in, the way I had for almost my entire life, except this time every step felt deliberate. Jaxon waited in the car at my request. This part needed to happen without him standing beside me. Whatever came out of this conversation, I needed to be the one who said it.Rivers was in the living room when I came in, sitting in his usual chair, a glass of wine untouched on the side table beside him. He looked up when he heard the door, and whatever he saw on my face made him go very still.“Hazel.”“Don’t… Please don’t do the concerned voice. Not right now.”He set down the glass he had been holding. “I have been eating for yu to cobe home. Did you see my calls?.”“I’m not here because of your calls.” I crossed the room and set my bag down on the coffee table, pulling out the folder I had been carrying since I left Oswald’s office. “I’m here because I want the truth. Every piece of it, not the version you’ve been managing for ei
Hazel’s POVIf the room was loud when Tiffany kissed Trey, then it was nothing compared to the chaos still going on after Jaxon and I broke their record.Everyone was clapping and chanting my name like I was suddenly one of them but I couldn’t hear any of it clearly because my head was spinning. I
Hazel’s POVI couldn't even find my voice to defend myself. What could I possibly tell Johnson and Marcus had happened?Their eyes darted between Tiffany curled up on the floor, with blood dripping from her palm, and me sitting frozen at the corner. Johnson muttered something under his breath to Ma
Hazel’s POV"Very thoughtful of you, Trey!" I let out a dry laugh, and I saw how that one hit him really hard.I know Trey has been raised to be a selfish person by our dad. Everything was always about him—whatever Trey wanted, he got. Meanwhile, I stayed in the shadows, daring not to say my choice
Tiffany's POVI could still hear the music pounding faintly from the other side of the house as most people had left the pool and gone into the house, but all I could feel was rage boiling in my chest, with my face burning up in heat."Ughh..how dare she cross me" I muttered to myself through my gr







