Chapter 2

"You're telling us you forgot waking up at six every morning to bring him breakfast?"

The girl stood up, her eyes full of mockery.

"It was freezing, and you wouldn't even wear gloves. You stood in line at the little cafe by the south entrance every morning to buy his favorite cinnamon oatmeal."

"Derek mentioned once that the library was full, and after that you started showing up at five in the morning, shivering outside the doors just to save him a seat."

Her words were like a switch, opening the floodgates for everyone else in the room.

"And junior year," another guy added, "Derek had a stomachache. You had a 102-degree fever, but you still stayed up all night to write his three-thousand-word term paper."

"The craziest one was his birthday."

"It was pouring rain. Every cab in the city had stopped running, and you ran two miles through the storm just to deliver some limited edition collectible."

"By the time you got to the dorm, you were soaked head to toe. Looked like a drowned rat."

They pieced together my past, one anecdote after another. They knew every detail because Derek had once treated these painfully private acts of devotion like trophies, bragging about them to his friends in the dorm and online.

Now they were entertainment at a college reunion.

I stood there in silence.

I listened to them describe a version of me who had sacrificed every shred of dignity.

I searched my mind for even a flicker of recognition.

There was nothing.

I only felt sorry for that girl.

She had woken up at six every morning to bring him breakfast, and all she had earned was their ridicule. She had run two miles through the rain with a birthday gift, and all she had become was "a drowned rat" in his friends' stories.

Derek leaned back in his chair and listened quietly as everyone catalogued my past sacrifices.

He didn't stop them from exposing me. If anything, he seemed to enjoy the spectacle of having an entire room prove that I had once loved him desperately.

When they finally ran out of stories, he raised a hand for silence.

"Did you hear all of that?"

"You'd erase all of that just to prove you don't care about me anymore? Just to make me apologize first?"

He sighed.

"Fine. I'll apologize. Shutting you out for six months was wrong."

"But dragging someone like Nathan Sterling into this as a prop just to punish me? Don't you think that's childish?"

At the sound of Nathan's name, my heart skipped.

The guy beside Derek jumped in immediately.

"Exactly, Ava. You stood up in front of the whole class and cut Nathan Sterling out of your life, all for Derek."

"Nathan's face went stone-cold. Then he left the country."

"And now you're running back to him just to get under Derek's skin? You're grinding your own face into the dirt."

I looked down at the diamond ring on my finger.

So I had once pushed Nathan away for the sake of the man sitting in front of me.

No wonder Nathan had looked at me with such careful restraint and tenderness ever since I woke up.

I lifted my head and met Derek's eyes.

"You all say I loved him so much I had no dignity left."

"Then why did I run out of our apartment into a downpour right before the wedding?"

The smile on Derek's face froze.

His fingers tightened around the teacup, knuckles going white.

The room went still.

The classmates who had been so eager to talk a moment ago all clamped their mouths shut in unison.

They exchanged glances, but nobody dared to touch my question.

Chloe scoffed, arms crossed.

"Go on, then. Why so quiet?"

"You were all so talkative a minute ago. Why don't you tell her why she ran?"

Derek set down his cup, his expression darkening.

He stared at me, a flash of irritation crossing his face.

"It was because of Selene moving in. You started overthinking."

He tossed out the name as though it were nothing.

To him, it was the most trivial thing in the world.