I'll Leave So You Can Be Happy
Ten years ago, a wildfire along Interstate 5 just outside Portland, Oregon, rewrote everyone's fate.
In that disaster, my parents died in the flames after risking their lives to pull young Claire Hart from the back seat of a trapped car.
After that, Claire's parents, James and Victoria Hart, took me in when I had no one, raised me, and covered every dollar of my tuition and living costs.
Everyone assumed that Claire's life and mine were already bound together, that we would go to college together, grow up side by side, get engaged, and eventually marry.
Then, late one night after graduation, I came across a Reddit post written by Claire ten years in the future. One line cut straight throug