Chapter Three

I woke up determined to be normal.

That was the whole plan, as far as I'd let myself think about it — get up, go to class, don't mention the call, don't mention the lounge, don't mention the words prove you trust me that had kept circling my head half the night like something caught in a drain. Normal felt like something I could still choose if I just held my face the right way.

I almost believed it, walking across the quad with my coffee going cold in my hand. The morning was bright in that thin, indifferent way mornings are when nothing around you knows what happened the night before. Students cut past me in twos and threes, laughing about things that had nothing to do with me, and for a few minutes I let myself borrow some of that lightness. I told myself the conversation with Valerian had been a fight, not a fracture. Couples fought. This didn't have to mean anything.

Prove you trust me. The words kept surfacing anyway, uninvited, no matter how many times I pushed them back under. I found myself already rehearsing how I'd behave the next time I saw him — calm, unbothered, nothing like the girl who'd stood frozen at the lounge the night before. If I could just be steady enough, reasonable enough, maybe I could prove whatever it was he needed proven and this would all go back to normal. I didn't ask myself, yet, what kind of love required proof in the first place.

Then I saw her.

Sereia was sitting on the low wall outside the student center, phone in one hand, sunlight catching the side of her face, looking exactly like a person who had done nothing wrong. My stomach dropped so fast I actually stopped walking. Some part of me wanted to turn around, cut through the science building, avoid the whole equation. But another part of me — the part that hadn't slept, the part still turning over Valerian's voice on the phone — needed to see her without him standing between us.

I kept walking.

She looked up when my shadow crossed hers, and for a second her expression was just mild, open curiosity. No guilt in it. No triumph. That, more than anything, threw me. I'd built her up overnight into something sharper — a rival, a woman who knew exactly what she was doing. But the girl in front of me just tilted her head and said, "Hey. Zéphyrine, right?"

"Right."

"I didn't get the chance to introduce myself properly last night. That was—" She winced, a small, embarrassed motion. "That was awkward. I'm sorry if I made things weird."

I studied her, waiting for the performance to crack. It didn't. She looked genuinely uncomfortable, genuinely sorry, in the specific way of someone who believes she's guilty of nothing worse than bad timing.

"It's fine," I said, because I didn't know what else to say, and because some old habit in me still reached for politeness before the truth.

"He talks about you a lot, you know." She said it lightly, like a gift she was handing me. "I think he's just been really stressed. His dad's been hard on him about the company stuff." She shrugged, glancing down at her phone like the topic wasn't heavy at all for her. "I told him he should just talk to you about it instead of venting to me all the time, but you know how he is."

I felt something cold settle under my ribs. "How long have you two been... talking?"

"A couple months? We met at Marcus's thing in the fall." She smiled, a little shy now, a little pleased. "Honestly, I wasn't sure at first if it was okay, since he mentioned things were rocky with you guys, but he said he was going to tell you eventually. About everything."

The words landed slow, one at a time, like stones dropped into still water.

"Tell me what?"

Something in my voice must have shifted, because Sereia's easy expression faltered. She looked at me properly for the first time, really looked, and I watched the exact moment the ground under her started to feel less solid too.

"That you guys were... on a break? Or that things weren't serious anymore?" Her voice climbed at the end, turning the statement into a question, into a plea for me to confirm something she suddenly wasn't sure of. "That's what he told me. That you two were basically done, just hadn't figured out the logistics yet."

The quad kept moving around us — bikes, backpacks, someone's laughter drifting from the fountain — while I stood there absorbing the particular kind of humiliation that comes from realizing you've been a character in two different stories at once, and only one of them was true.

"We weren't done," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, which surprised me almost as much as her answer had. "We were never on a break. We had dinner two nights ago. He kissed me in front of half the café."

Sereia's face went through something complicated — disbelief, embarrassment, and underneath both, a flicker of anger that had nothing to do with me. "He told me you guys barely spoke anymore," she said quietly. "He said you'd basically stopped trying."

"He tells a lot of people a lot of things," I said, and I heard the bitterness creep into it before I could stop it.

For a moment neither of us spoke. Two strangers who'd just discovered they were standing on the same lie from opposite sides.

"I didn't know," she said finally, and I believed her, which somehow made it worse. If she'd been cruel, I could have hated her cleanly. Instead I just felt tired, and old in a way twenty-two shouldn't feel, and strangely, unfairly protective of her — this girl who had also been handed a version of Valerian designed just for her.

"I know," I said. "That's kind of the point."

I could have said more. Some sharper version of myself — a version I didn't quite have access to yet — might have laughed in her face, or demanded she show me every message, or made her feel even a fraction of what was currently unspooling in my chest. But some old instinct held me back, the same one that had apologized to Valerian for things that weren't my fault a hundred times before. So instead I just stood there, absorbing it quietly, filing it away like one more thing I'd have to carry without dropping.

• • •

I don't remember walking away from her. I remember the inside of the student center — fluorescent lights, the smell of burnt coffee, the low murmur of people who had no idea the floor had just tilted under someone twenty feet away from them — and I remember sitting down hard on one of the plastic chairs because my legs had stopped feeling entirely reliable.

Different versions. That was the phrase that wouldn't stop repeating. He had built a version of himself for me — devoted, overwhelmed, loyal despite the pressure — and a completely different version for her: single, unburdened, free to be pursued. Both versions couldn't be true. Only one version of Valerian actually existed, and I was starting to understand that neither of us had ever really met him.

"You look like you saw a ghost."

I looked up. Rhydian was standing there with a tray in one hand, watching me with the same unhurried attention he always seemed to carry, like he had all the time in the world to wait for whatever answer I gave him.

"Rough morning," I said.

He didn't push, the way he never did. He just set his tray down across from me, uninvited but not unwelcome, and said, "Rough mornings usually go better with food. You want some?"

I almost laughed — a real one this time, small and surprised out of me. "I'm okay."

"You sure? You look like you're planning a murder."

"Just recalculating some things."

He nodded slowly, like that answer made perfect sense to him, like he'd learned a long time ago not to require explanations from people who weren't ready to give them. "Recalculating's underrated," he said. "People rush that part."

I didn't tell him what had actually happened. I wasn't ready to say it out loud to anyone who might actually believe me without an argument attached. But something about sitting there, across from someone who wasn't demanding anything from me, who wasn't twisting my own perception back at me, felt like the first steady ground I'd stood on all morning.

"You don't have to figure it out right now," he said, after a while, not looking up from his tray, like the observation cost him nothing. "Whatever it is."

"Is that supposed to be reassuring?"

"It's supposed to be true." He glanced up then, and there was nothing performative in it, none of the practiced warmth Valerian turned on like a light switch. Just a plain, steady attention that didn't ask anything of me in return. "Most people rush to have an answer before they've even let themselves feel the question. You don't have to do that."

I didn't know what to do with that kind of patience. I wasn't used to it. I sat with it a moment longer than I meant to, then gathered my bag, thanked him for the coffee I hadn't touched, and told myself it didn't mean anything that I felt lighter walking away than I had walking in.

• • •

I saw Valerian an hour later, crossing the quad from the opposite direction, and for one humiliating second my whole body reacted before my mind caught up — a small, foolish lift of hope that maybe Sereia had told him she knew now, that maybe he was already coming to find me, to fix this, to prove that what I'd just learned wasn't as ugly as it looked.

He saw me. I know he saw me, because his eyes found mine across the distance and held there for half a second, the way they always had, the way that used to mean something.

Then his gaze slid past me.

Sereia was coming out of the student center behind me, phone still in her hand, and something in Valerian's face shifted — not guilt, not even hesitation. Just a quick, practical recalculation, the same kind I imagined he made a dozen times a day without ever noticing he was making it.

He changed direction.

I watched him cross the space between them instead of the space between us, watched him say something that made her laugh despite everything, watched the two of them fall into step together and walk away without either of them looking back.

I stood there in the middle of the quad with my coffee gone cold in my hand, and the only thing I felt — stronger than hurt, stronger than humiliation — was the sudden, sick clarity of understanding exactly how easily I could be the one left standing alone.