Chapter 1

Late on the second night after graduation, bored and unable to sleep, I was scrolling through a college admissions subreddit when a popular post caught my eye.

The title was blunt enough to sting: "If you could choose your life all over again, would you give up the person your parents saddled you with?"

The poster's avatar was a faded blue electric guitar, and the username ended in ClaireHart. I knew it instantly. Claire had saved six months of allowance to buy that guitar when she was fifteen. Later, it had been dropped and the neck cracked, but she could not bear to replace either the guitar or the avatar.

More than a thousand comments had already piled up beneath the post, and the thread was still climbing. I opened it and read.

She wrote that years earlier her parents had taken in a boy. His parents had died saving her during a deadly wildfire evacuation. Afterward, he moved into her home, grew up beside her, and became the boy everyone assumed would one day be her fiance and, eventually, her husband.

"He's not a bad person."

Five simple words, almost weightless, yet they left me unable to breathe.

"But he is the living face of a debt my parents took on, and he grew up beside me. Every time I try to choose something for myself, someone reminds me that his parents gave their lives for mine."

The cold white light of the screen lay across the back of my hand like a thin layer of frost, and the chill ran up from my fingertips into my chest.

I knew better than anyone that she was writing about me.

Ten years earlier, during the wildfire evacuation on I-5, the Harts' car was trapped near the fire line. My father ran into the burning traffic and carried Claire out of the back seat while my mother waited on the shoulder for rescue crews. In the end, a pickup truck lost control, tore through the median barrier, and both my parents died in the fire.

The Harts arranged my parents' funeral, made sure my elderly grandmother was cared for, and covered all my living expenses and tuition. They treated me like their own son and never once made me feel I had been slighted. Claire and I had promised each other since childhood that after graduation we would attend the University of Oregon together, enter the engineering program, and spend every year side by side.

But then I checked the profile, and my heart clenched.

The bio said the poster was twenty-eight.

But the Claire I knew had only just turned eighteen.

I signed into an old throwaway account I had not touched in years and typed a question: "What happened after that? Did you ever get free of him?"

The reply came back almost instantly, as if she had been sitting on the other side of the screen waiting for me to ask.

"At our engagement party, I admitted in front of everyone that the person I loved was Logan. I controlled the financial guarantee for his grandmother's surgery and threatened to withdraw it unless he ended the engagement. He took off the ring and begged me not to take away the money keeping his grandmother alive. In the end, he called off the engagement."

Each word pierced my nerves like a needle. My fingertips went numb, and my whole body locked up.

My grandmother, Margaret Dawson, had struggled with a heart condition for years, and her ongoing treatment cost a fortune. I could not believe that ten years later Claire would use the funding for her care as leverage to force me to end our engagement.

I forced myself past the pounding in my chest and kept scrolling. At the bottom of the thread was a blurry engagement photo. Claire wore a simple white dress and a delicate silver ring, her expression unreadable. The man beside her lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the glare, and the irregular burn scar on his right hand was unmistakable.

That was Logan Pierce's hand. My best friend since childhood.

We met at twelve, played ball together, skipped class together, and stood shoulder to shoulder at my parents' funeral, blocking out all the curious stares. I thought we were brothers for life. It had never occurred to me that one day he would be standing where I should have been, shielding the girl I loved.

In the photo, a small silver compass hung at Claire's throat. The Harts had given us a matching pair on our sixteenth birthdays, so that no matter how far apart we went, we would always be able to find our way back to each other.

Mine still lay at the back of my desk drawer, as pristine as the day I received it.

She added another comment. Relief filled every line, but regret lingered underneath. "If I could go back to the summer after high school, I'd go to Santorini with Logan instead of spending four dull years studying engineering beside him, weighed down by guilt."

Santorini.

And I remembered that just last week Claire had told me she was going to the coast with some classmates to unwind.

I closed the thread and sat there for a long time, unable to settle what was churning in my chest. Claire's light laughter carried in from the living room. She was talking with Victoria about going out tomorrow to buy supplies for college.

Her voice came through the thin door perfectly clearly. "Ethan, do you think the blue suitcase or the gray one looks better?"

I looked up at the Leiden acceptance letter sitting on top of my desk. The Netherlands, an engineering program taught in English, a scholarship generous enough to cover two years of living costs and medical bills for my grandmother and me.

I had already decided to turn that offer down, hard as it had been to get. I had told myself that staying in Oregon, staying close to the Harts and to Claire, was the best way to repay what they had done for me.

But in that moment I finally understood. Gratitude means giving something back. It does not mean chaining your whole life down, and it does not mean sacrificing yourself.

"The gray one," I said, my voice flat, giving nothing away.

Only after her footsteps faded down the hall did I open the email I had been leaving unanswered and press accept.

A confirmation page came up, black text on white, sharp enough to sting.

I looked at that line of text and the weight I had carried for years lifted all at once. Leaving had never been a betrayal. It was a choice that should have been mine all along.