Chapter 1

Quinn's POV

Rainwater dripped from my bangs and splashed across Landon Jarrett's profile picture, each drop making the image beneath it seem even larger.

Back when we first started dating, I’d deliberately picked a profile picture matching his so we’d have matching icons. Looking at it now, I couldn't believe how childish I'd been.

I opened our chat and asked him one last time.

[Can you change your profile picture?]

This time, his reply came almost immediately.

[Quinn Sterling, are you seriously still on this?]

[I've transferred out of state specifically to keep my distance. What else do you want me to do?]

Same old Landon. Somehow, he always managed to turn it around and make me the unreasonable one.

My best friend, Zoe Langford, had dated Landon.

I hadn't even known that until we'd already been together for six months. It had been awkward to find out, but I hadn't thought much of it at the time. Everyone had a past.

Then Zoe started finding her way into more and more of our plans.

"A friend gave me three movie tickets. We might as well invite Zoe instead of letting the extra one go to waste."

"You girls both like dessert, right? It's buy one, get one free, so we can grab one for Zoe too."

"What's so great about camping anyway? Doesn't Zoe like white-water rafting? The three of us can all fit in the same raft."

Even when I took Landon home to meet my parents, he insisted on bringing Zoe with us.

"What if your parents don't like me or don't think we're right for each other? At least Zoe can put in a good word for me."

In the end, my parents and I sat there waiting for two hours, and Landon never showed up.

Zoe had twisted her ankle on the way over, so he'd rushed her to the ER instead.

That was the moment I'd finally had enough and told him we were done. Landon didn't bother explaining himself. He simply sent me a copy of his transfer notice.

"Is this what it's going to take for you to finally believe me?!"

Then he moved more than six hundred miles away and gave me the cold shoulder for six months.

In the end, Zoe was the one who tricked him into coming back and arranged for us to see each other again. That was how we reconciled.

I'd actually thought he would change after that.

Now, I couldn't even bring myself to keep arguing with him. I tossed my phone aside and went to take a shower, and Landon didn't message me again either.

At two in the morning, my phone rang.

The moment I answered, Landon's irritated voice came through the speaker.

"Why aren't you answering my messages?"

That was when I noticed the dozen or so texts he'd sent me, all asking how I'd made that egg dish from last time.

The funny thing was, he'd complained that he didn't even like it when I made it, so I'd never bothered adding the recipe to the notebook.

My head was pounding, and I didn't have the energy to play along anymore.

"Zoe wants it, doesn't she?"

"How did you know..."

His voice trailed off abruptly.

A second later, he sent me a photo of the couch. A thin blanket lay rumpled across the cushions.

"Don't make it out to be something it's not. I'm sleeping out here at night. Nothing happened between us."

I narrowed my eyes at the picture.

The loveseat wasn't even five feet long. Landon was six-three. If he tried to sleep on that thing, half his legs would be hanging off the end.

I rolled onto my side, my throat so dry that my voice came out rough.

"Right. You drove more than ten hours just to pick her up from work, got out of bed in the middle of the night to make her a late-night snack, and you're so determined to stay at her place that you're willing to sleep on a couch you don't even fit on.

"You've already done everything but sleep with her. What else could you possibly do?"

Take off their clothes?

Going all the way?

What difference would that make?

"Quinn! What the hell is wrong with you —"

"I'll send you the recipe in a minute."

I cut off his angry outburst, my voice so calm it barely sounded like my own.

Silence settled over the call.

Landon clearly wasn't used to hearing me sound this detached, because when he spoke again, his tone had softened.

"You're not mad?"

I gave a faint, humorless smile.

"We're already broken up. Whatever you do has nothing to do with me anymore, so what would I even be mad about?"

He went silent for several seconds before his voice suddenly rose.

"What do you mean, we're broken up? Why are you talking like this again? When did I ever agree to that? Did I say we were done?"

Question after question came at me, but not a single one of them was an explanation.

For the past two months, I'd been staying at work until midnight almost every night, saving up as much time off as I could so I could go see him. Even my parents had noticed over video calls that I'd lost more than ten pounds and kept telling me how worried they were.

Landon, meanwhile, hadn't seemed to notice any of it. I was so speechless at his outburst I almost laughed.

"You're my boyfriend, but you're spending the middle of the night at another woman's apartment. Did you ask me if I was okay with that?"