Chapter 1

Sawyer froze.

Lina looked at me apologetically. "Joelle, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to."

I forced a smile. "It's okay."

"Then why did you break up?"

Why?

Because I spent three years protecting a relationship that could never exist in the open.

And now, I'm done.

She rolled her wheelchair closer and patted my hand like a concerned older sister.

"Relationships aren't something you just give up on. It'd be such a shame to break up over something small. Look at Sawyer and me. We broke up back then because we were young and stubborn."

She looked at him, her eyes soft.

"But luckily, we found our way back to each other."

Silence settled over the room. All I could hear was our uneven breathing.

I gently pulled my hand away and smiled.

"It wasn't something small. And it wasn't youth or temper. It was because his heart still belongs to someone else."

Lina pressed her lips together and laughed awkwardly.

I looked up, my gaze sliding past her and landing on Sawyer.

His brows were drawn tight. His expression was tense as he stared back at me.

Unreadable.

A moment later, he stepped over and casually took the meal container from my hand. His fingers brushed the back of my hand.

Comfort?

Or a warning?

I couldn't tell.

I looked at them standing together. They looked like a perfect couple.

Of course they did.

They'd once been in love.

She was his college girlfriend—smart, beautiful, the kind of girl who turned heads without trying.

They'd even talked about marriage.

Then, during their final year, she dumped him for a rich heir.

No one saw it coming.

He shut himself in his room for a month.

He drank. He couldn't sleep. He lost so much weight he barely looked like himself.

I sat with him on that cold floor, staring into space beside him for hours without saying a word.

I covered for him with his family and hid the worst of it.

I watched him pull himself out of heartbreak.

I watched him build his company from nothing until it finally found its footing.

Then one day, out of nowhere, he said—

"Joelle, let's be together."

I thought the love I'd hidden for so many years had finally come back to me.

I was wrong.

It was only the start of the cruelest joke life could play on me.

Just days after we started dating, Lina got into a car accident.