Chapter Two

Something cold moves through my chest. Not fear exactly. More like a warning. The kind of feeling you get right before something is about to take a huge turn and not in a good way.

I call him back.

"Patrick. What's going on?"

There's a short pause on his end. "The opposing counsel filed their appearance this morning." Another pause. "Maya, I need you to be prepared. The company on the other side , they've retained Harrington Legal."

I could feel the world going very quiet around me.

"Harrington Legal," I repeat slowly.

"Yes. And their lead?” Patrick clears his throat. "Their lead is listed as E. Harrington. I'm sorry, I don't know if this is the same,”

"It is," I say. My voice doesn't shake. I make sure of it. "I'll be there in twenty minutes."

I hang up. I stand very still on the subway stairs while people push past me on both sides.

Ethan.

After six years of silence. After everything that broke between us. After all the things that were said and the things that were not.

He's going to be on the other side of my courtroom.

I take one breath. Then another.

Rule number two, Maya. Be the most prepared person in the room.

I continue down the stairs.

I was twenty years old the first time I met Ethan's mom.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let me tell you who we were before everything else. Before the lawyers and the courtrooms and the six years of silence. Before his mother, before the fights, before the night I signed papers with a hand that would not stop shaking because I finally understood love wasn't always enough.

Let me tell you who we were when it was still simple.

By second semester of freshman year, Ethan and I were inseparable. At some point, studying together every Thursday turned into spending nearly every day together without either of us noticing when it happened.

We walked along the Hudson when the weather was warm, fingers tangled together inside his coat pocket when mine got cold. We followed each other on everything, texted constantly, and when texting wasn’t enough, he’d call me just to hear my voice. Sometimes we talked about classes. Sometimes music. Sometimes absolutely nothing. and I look forward to those calls even though I told myself I shouldn't.

Jade saw it before I did.

"You like him," she said one evening from across our dorm room. We were in our dorm room and I was pretending to read.

"I do not," I glanced up from my book.

She gave me a look over the top of her laptop"Maya,you smiled at your phone three times in the last ten minutes and you haven't read a single page."

I looked down at the same paragraph I’d been staring at for twenty minutes . She was right.

"He's just a friend," I muttered weakly.

Jade made a face. "Baby, the way you talk about that boy, he has never been just a friend."

She was right about that too. She's annoying that way.

The day Ethan confessed his feelings for me, it was on a rainy evening in April. I would never forget. We were standing under the awning of a coffee shop on Bleecker Street, waiting for the rain to slow down, and he just said it. Quietly, like it was simple. Like it was already true and he was just saying it out loud for the first time.

"I think I'm in love with you, Maya."

I remember looking at him and thinking: this is a mistake. Not because I didn't feel the same way. I did. I had for months. But I knew even then, even before I knew anything about his family, I knew that boys like Ethan didn't end up with girls like me. Not in the long run. The world always had a way of reminding you of your place.

But he was looking at me with those warm brown eyes and rain was coming down on the street behind him, and I was twenty years old and tired of being careful.

"I think I am too," I let out.

He smiled. The kind that started slow and then took over his whole face. He reached out and tucked one of my curls back behind my ear, so gently, like I was something worth being careful with.

I should have held onto that moment. I should have taken a picture of it in my mind.

Because things got complicated fast.

Ethan's world was different from mine in ways I couldn't fully understand until I was inside it.

The first clue was the apartment. Not a dorm room an actual apartment, near campus, that his parents paid for. Nice furniture. A kitchen with a working espresso machine. I remember walking in for the first time and stopping in the doorway like I had stepped into a different city.

"You live here?" I forced myself to finally ask.

"Yeah. Since September," he sounded, like it was nothing.

The second clue was his friend group. Carter James was Ethan's best friend from high school, a broad-shouldered, loud-laughing guy from Connecticut who wore watches that cost more than my mom's car. He was nice enough to me not mean, just indifferent in the way people are when you don't fully register on their radar. There was also Simone, who was beautiful and polished and had gone to the same boarding school as Ethan, and who looked at me sometimes with an expression I couldn't quite name.

I didn't say anything about any of it. I just watched. I filed things away.

My world was different no questions asked.

After classes and studying, I waitressed three evenings a week at a restaurant near campus. I sent money home to my mom every month not much, but enough to help with rent. I bought my textbooks secondhand and returned them at the end of the semester. I budgeted down to the last dollar.

Ethan never made me feel less than. That's more important. He never looked down on me or made comments or acted like my life was something to pity. He asked about my mom with genuine interest. He showed up at the restaurant once with Carter just to eat there, just to see where I worked, and he tipped more than the bill and pretended not to know I would see it.

He was good. He was genuinely, honestly good. And that made me fell madly in love with him.

But his family was a different story.