บททั้งหมดของ Rich Love : บทที่ 121 - บทที่ 130

J.J.’s POVThere comes a moment when silence stops being a shield and starts being a prison.For weeks, I’d watched her glide past me like I was smoke — there, but untouchable. Carolyn didn’t shout. She didn’t whisper. She didn’t even look at me. And somehow that was worse than any insult Emma ever spat at me in her calculated cruelty.And I’d taken it.I deserved the silence. Maybe if I endured it long enough, it would hurt less. But it didn’t. It only hollowed me out.And so tonight, I couldn’t take it anymore.The opportunity came in the hallway after last bell, when the building was half-empty and the late light pooled through the tall windows, throwing long shadows across the floor.She was there, tucking books into her bag, shoulders set with that deliberate sharpness she wore now like armor.I stopped three feet from her. “Carolyn.”Her spine stiffened, but she didn’t look up.“I don’t want to do this,” she said flatly, her voice carrying like a blade through the quiet corridor

Carolyn’s POVThe first whisper reached me before the first bell.It slithered down the hall as I walked toward homeroom, carried in the hiss of two girls leaning too close to each other. They froze when they saw me, their mouths snapping shut, their eyes wide.That was all it took.By the time I reached my locker, whispers weren’t whispers anymore. They were accusations.“Cokehead.”“Figures.”“She looks the type—quiet but dirty.”Someone laughed as I passed. A sharp, ugly laugh.And though I didn’t look back, I knew.They thought I was the reason everyone knew J.J.’s secret.No. Not thought. They were sure.By the second period, I understood why.It was the kind of rumor too precise to be random. Too sharp to be a coincidence.They knew he overdosed.They knew I was there.They knew I took him to the hospital.I sat in the back of the classroom, my pencil limp between my fingers, heart thundering as snippets of conversation reached me from every direction.“She must’ve been high too

Carolyn’s POVIt’s strange how quickly a lie becomes a truth when people want to believe it.By Monday morning, the lie had already settled into the walls of the school like mold—thick, suffocating, impossible to scrape off.They said I was the one who told.That I leaked J.J.’s secret.That I was the reason everyone now knew about the cocaine, the overdose, the night at the club when I dragged him—half-conscious, shaking, terrified—into the back of a taxi and begged the driver to go faster.They twisted it into betrayal.Not loyalty. Not love. Not the desperate thing it had really been.Betrayal.And J.J. believed it.The confrontation still rang in my ears.His voice. His eyes. The way he looked at me like I was the knife in his back.“You couldn’t wait, could you?”I hadn’t even been able to breathe. The words clung to me, sticky and sharp.I didn’t fight back. I didn’t defend myself.Because for a moment, standing there in that hallway with everyone’s eyes on us, I thought maybe I

Carolyn’s POVThere are certain words you can’t ever take back.They don’t just cut you in the moment.They stay. They burrow. They become part of you.“Liar.”That was the word J.J. hurled at me in the middle of the courtyard.Not whispered. Not quietly. Not between us.He made sure everyone heard.For a second after he said it, I forgot how to breathe.I stood there, frozen, with all those eyes on me—peers, teachers, people who already hated me, people who were waiting for me to fall.And he gave them exactly what they wanted.He painted me as the villain in one word.Liar.I wanted to scream.I wanted to shake him and say, I saved you that night. I dragged you out of the bathroom. I kept you alive.But the words stuck in my throat.Because his face—God, his face—was so sure. So certain.Like he’d already built the verdict in his head and nothing I could say would change it.So I walked away.And with every step, the pieces of me cracked further.By the time I reached the girls’ res

Carolyn’s POVThere are some things you can’t come back from.Being called a liar was one of them.Not because the word itself had power.But because once people believed it, it didn’t matter what you said afterward. Truth got buried under whispers, under narrowed eyes, under the poison of doubt.And now, everywhere I went, doubt followed me like a shadow.It started with the stares.The day Emma’s rumor took root, I felt them before I even saw them.Eyes burned into the back of my neck in the cafeteria. Conversations stuttered when I walked into classrooms. Smiles slid away like curtains being drawn.By lunch, the whispers had sharpened into words.“She told everyone.”“Snitched.”“Jealous much?”The worst part wasn’t the whispers.It was the silence.The people who didn’t even bother to say it out loud because their eyes already said everything.And J.J.God. J.J.He didn’t look at me with curiosity or even confusion.He looked at me like he knew.Like he’d already judged me guilty.