CHAPTER 13 - THE RETURN

*Jace's POV*

College move-in day always looked the same at Ashford ..... parents crying in parking lots, freshmen hauling boxes up dorm stairs, upperclassmen pretending they weren't watching to see who'd changed over the break.

Jace leaned against his truck in the student lot, sunglasses on, watching Mason argue with a campus parking attendant about a permit that clearly wasn't valid.

"Dude, just move the truck," Tyler said, laughing.

"I'm not moving it. I paid for a spot."

"You paid for a spot at the wrong dorm."

"That's a technicality."

Jace tuned it out, half-listening, half still somewhere else entirely .... the way he'd been most of the summer if he was honest with himself. A group of girls walked past, and one of them, a sophomore named Reagan he vaguely recognized from a party last spring, gave him a slow once-over and a smile that used to mean something.

"Ryland." She stopped walking. "You look good for someone who apparently broke a guy's jaw over summer."

"Word travels."

"Everything travels." She tucked her hair behind her ear. "You free later?"

"Busy."

She laughed like he was joking. He wasn't, though he couldn't have said what he was actually busy with. She eventually gave up and drifted off with her friends, and Mason appeared at his shoulder a second later, smirking.

"You just turned down Reagan Cole."

"Yep."

"The Reagan Cole who dated a guy on the swim team for two years and made him cry when she dumped him."

"Didn't ask for her résumé."

"I'm just saying." Mason bumped his shoulder. "Old you would've had her number in his phone by now."

"Old me had a lot of bad habits."

Mason gave him a look .... the same look he'd been giving Jace all summer, equal parts amused and worried .... but didn't push it. They headed toward the main building together, the campus loud and chaotic with move-in traffic, and Jace let himself get swallowed by it for a while, nodding at people he half-knew, half-listening to Tyler complain about his class schedule.

It was easy to almost forget, some days.

Almost.

By afternoon, a different kind of noise had taken over the halls.

Jace caught the first fragment of it walking past the student affairs office, two girls huddled over a laptop screen, practically vibrating.

"Okay but did you SEE him?"

"I only saw the ID photo, but oh my god."

"Green hair. Actual green hair. Who does that?"

"Someone with a jawline like THAT, apparently."

Jace kept walking, only half-registering it, the way you register weather .... something happening around you that had nothing to do with you.

By the time he reached the cafeteria for lunch, it had grown into something bigger. Sophie was there, at their usual table, practically bouncing in her seat while she scrolled through her phone.

"Have you heard?" she said, the second Jace and Mason sat down.

"Heard what?" Mason asked.

"There's a transfer student. Apparently he's insanely hot. Green hair, tall, whole thing." She turned her phone around, showing a blurry photo someone had clearly taken without permission, a tall guy walking across the quad, face angled away from the camera. "Half the girls in my dorm have already lost their minds."

"It's one guy," Jace said, more sharply than he meant to.

Sophie blinked at him. "Okay, relax. I'm just telling you what's happening."

"Sorry." Jace rubbed the back of his neck. "Long day."

"Uh huh." Sophie didn't look convinced, but let it go, sliding back into gossip mode. "Anyway. Apparently he transferred from somewhere out of state. Nobody knows his name yet."

"Someone probably knows," Mason said. "Someone always knows."

"Not yet. It's driving people insane." Sophie grinned. "I love this school."

Jace stabbed at his food without much interest, only half-listening as Sophie kept talking, cataloguing every fragment of gossip drifting through the cafeteria like she was building a case file. Green hair. Tall. Barely says a word to anyone. Already three separate girls claiming they'd talked to him and gotten nothing but a polite nod in return.

None of it meant anything to Jace.

He told himself that all through lunch.

His last class of the day was English Lit, a required course he'd been dreading since he saw it on his schedule. He got there early out of habit more than anything, dropped into a seat near the back, and half-listened to the noise of students filing in around him.

"Did you hear the transfer's in one of the Lit sections?" someone said behind him.

"Which one?"

"Nobody knows. Everyone's checking their roster like it's a lottery ticket."

Jace pulled out his laptop and tried to focus on anything else. The professor, a woman named Dr. Ashwood with sharp reading glasses and zero patience for tardiness, walked in exactly on time and set her bag down at the front of the room.

"Settle down," she said, not even raising her voice, and the chatter died fast.

She ran through the syllabus in the brisk, unbothered tone of someone who'd done this a hundred times, barely glancing up from her notes. Jace typed the due dates into his phone without really absorbing them, his mind somewhere else entirely, the way it had been for weeks.

Then Dr. Ashwood looked up, glancing toward the door.

"We have a new student joining us this semester," she said. "Come on in."

The door opened.

Every head in the room turned at once.

"Go ahead," Dr. Ashwood said, gesturing toward the front. "Introduce yourself."

The door opened.

Every head in the room turned at once.

"Go ahead," Dr. Ashwood said, gesturing toward the front. "Introduce yourself."

A tall guy stepped inside, backpack slung over one shoulder, green-tinted hair falling loosely over his forehead. Around the room, chairs creaked as people sat up straighter. A girl two seats over from Jace pulled out a compact mirror and checked her lip gloss in about two seconds flat. Someone else quickly fixed their ponytail.

Jace didn't look up. He was still scrolling through the syllabus P*F, half-listening, waiting for whoever this was to say his name and get it over with so class could actually start.

"Hi," the guy said. "I'm...."

Jace's hand went still on his laptop.

He knew that voice.

He'd know that voice anywhere .... in a crowded hallway, through a closed door, across three years of jokes he wished he could take back one at a time.

He looked up.

The room tilted.

Taller. Leaner. Green hair instead of the same dark brown Jace used to see from a bedroom window across the street. A different posture entirely, shoulders back instead of curled in like he was trying to take up less space. But the eyes were the same. The mouth was the same. Every single thing that mattered was exactly the same, underneath all of it.

"Ezra."

It came out of him before he could stop it, cracked and disbelieving, loud enough that half the room turned to look at him instead.

His chair scraped back so hard it toppled over behind him. He didn't stop to pick it up. He was already moving, crossing the room in a handful of long strides while Dr. Ashwood said something he didn't hear and forty pairs of eyes tracked him like he'd lost his mind.

Maybe he had.

He reached Ezra and pulled him into his arms before either of them could think better of it, face pressed into his shoulder, holding on hard enough that he felt Ezra go rigid against him. His throat burned. His eyes burned worse. Three months of an empty street and a dark window and a door that never opened again broke loose all at once, and Jace didn't care that the entire room was watching, didn't care that Mason's mouth had fallen open near the back, didn't care about anything except that Ezra Monroe was standing in front of him, alive and real and breathing.

"You're here," Jace said against his shoulder, voice wrecked. "You're actually here."

Ezra didn't hug him back.

He stood there, arms at his sides, completely still, while Jace held on like letting go might make him disappear again.

"I'm sorry," Jace said, the words spilling out before he could stop them, months of rehearsed apologies collapsing into something smaller and rawer than any of them. "I'm so sorry, I should've said something, I should've stopped them, I should've...."

"I'm sorry, who are you?"