Chapter 2

Mason and I had grown up under the same roof, but being together had been our choice.

My parents died in a highway pileup during the winter I was eight. Grandpa Reed had been an old friend of my dad’s. He became my legal guardian and brought me home to the redbrick house in Cherry Hills.

That first night, I wouldn’t sleep in my new room. Mason dragged a sleeping bag into the hallway and said the floor out there was the best place to watch for shooting stars. There weren’t any stars on the ceiling, obviously, but I talked to him through the door until the middle of the night.

Eventually, we went to Lakewood Prep together. He saved me a seat at the back of the bus, and I checked his physics homework for all the units he kept getting wrong. Whenever I had a migraine, he shut off his game and closed the living room blinds, one slat at a time.

For ten years, he remembered my presentation dates better than he remembered his own practice schedule.

At our junior-year homecoming dance, he took my hand outside the gym. He was so nervous he tore the paper wristband around his wrist. I laughed, and his ears went red. “Well? You’ve got to answer me. Do you want to go out with me or not?”

Grandpa hadn’t set us up or pushed us into anything. I’d wanted Mason, and he’d wanted me just as much.

Audrey transferred to Lakewood at the start of the spring semester. When they were little, she’d lived next door to the Reeds and gone to kindergarten with Mason. They’d lost touch after she moved to Phoenix. Now her mom had gotten divorced and had shoulder surgery, so they’d returned to Denver and were staying in their old neighborhood.

Mason showed her around on her first day. She ran over and hugged him, and he laughed, calling her by an old childhood nickname. Then he pulled me closer. “This is Nora. My girlfriend.”

I offered her my hand. I was genuinely glad to meet her.

I helped her choose classes, told her which lunch line moved fastest, and sent her the senior committee’s volunteer list. She said she didn’t want Mason to have to babysit her forever. She wanted to make friends of her own.

Then, before the spring fundraiser, I went to the theater classroom to pick up some posters and heard her talking to her mom backstage.

“They’re practically heading off to college together,” the woman on the phone said. “What exactly are you waiting for?”

Audrey leaned against a prop rack. “He’s used to running everything by her. But when I bring up when we were kids, he sticks around. Give me a little more time.”

I pushed the door open. The instant she saw me, she turned her phone facedown. “You heard that?”

“I want to know if you ever actually thought of me as a friend.”

She said her mom had been a mess since the surgery and was terrified of Audrey getting abandoned again. That was why she said things like that. She caught my hand and begged me not to tell Mason.

When I pulled away, her foot reached the edge of the stage. I tried to catch her, but she grabbed me, and we both went down the two steps together. I hurt my ankle. She sprained her wrist.

Mason got the nurse and later drove me home. That evening, with an ice pack against my swollen ankle, I told him exactly what I’d heard backstage.

He kept calling it a misunderstanding.

“Her dad’s already started another family. Maybe she was just telling her mom what she wanted to hear.” He looked at me. “We’re fine. You and me. Why are you letting her get to you?”

“Why doesn’t what I say count for anything?”

“I’m not calling you a liar.” He sounded exasperated. “But I’ve known her since we were kids. I can’t be expected to pick a side every time you two have a fight.”

Over the next few months, he grew less and less willing to hear Audrey’s name. Someone swapped her backing track before a solo, and she said I was the only person who’d been in the sound booth. Her asthma inhaler went missing, and she claimed I’d been near her locker at lunch.

I got the teacher on duty to check the times. I found the medication pouch she’d left in the locker room and handed it to the nurse. Even after I cleared things up, Mason just seemed exhausted by us both.

“Could you two cut me a break for once?”

The worst was the blue ink soaking through my dad’s travel sketchbook. Audrey apologized for knocking over the bottle. When I stopped her from taking the book, my fingers left two red marks on her hand. Mason walked in and asked why I’d grabbed her.

That night, he brought up breaking up again. I waited on the porch until he came home. I told him I wasn’t trying to leave him, but he had to hear me out, too. He hugged me and promised it wouldn’t happen again.

We didn’t fight every day. When I finished my display model, he borrowed an old station wagon from a classmate and helped me deliver it to school. He drove so carefully, afraid a sudden stop would damage it, that people honked at us the whole way.

When I got into Harvard, he lifted me off my feet and spun me around the kitchen. Only much later did he ask whether Boston might be too far away.

I said I still had to go over the financial aid package. He immediately pulled up the websites for colleges in Colorado, pointing out the distances on a map and asking if we could still see each other on weekends. He asked so carefully that I couldn’t bring myself to talk about long distance that night.

Looking back, I should’ve been clearer. I wanted a future with him. I couldn’t put my own future away just to make him feel secure.

I remembered the good things. They were why I’d kept trying. But after hearing him bet on whether I’d come crawling back, I finally left our chat closed. I couldn’t keep proving I loved him by letting him hurt me.