world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty.
Stevie Nicks
Vincent has been gone for almost five months.
The only people who’ve managed to visit him twice are his parents, and even they are allowed as little time as possible with him so his healing isn’t interrupted. Every time they go, they carry with them the small gifts I keep buying for him, as if each one could bridge the miles between us.
Phone calls are rare. Two per week, at most. The less he uses his phone, the better for his recovery. But every time his voice reaches me through the line, it feels like I can breathe again.
It’s not just me who misses him. Steven has been dragging himself through the bakery like a zombie since Vincent left,though Holly has been doing her best to keep him on his toes. Holly’s nineteen, with a habit of wearing flower-print overrals and pinning her unruly red hair up with pencils or pens. She started her internship at White & Cream in January, and her energy’s nothing short of volcanic.
She provokes Steven relentlessly, sparks flying between them with every exchange, and we all laugh watching it unfold. Will swears she’s like Starfire, and honestly, he’s right. The chemistry between them is undeniable—like watching Dick Grayson and Kory flirt all over again.
I haven’t seen that kind of spark since Sam and Maggie. Speaking about them... Whatever’s happening between them is... complicated. They’re not officially together, but the connection is obvious. And when our landlord threw us out for missing rent, Sam suggested we all move into his apartment.
Now Maggie occupies the guest room—though I’m almost certain she sneaks into Sam’s room most nights. I sleep in Vincent’s room. Before agreeing, I wrote to ask him if it was okay. A week later, his letter arrived, telling me to stick my glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and hang my posters on onlymyside of our wardrobe. He asked me to set all my plants on the windowsill, to place my boots in the shoe rack, and to let my CDs and books mingle with his. He told me to make the room feel like it belonged tous.
Will’s seeing a guy he met during his first bartending shift, which honestly still feels kind of surreal. He went from never stepping behind a bar to suddenly mixing cocktails and apparently flirting his way into a date in the same night. Classic Will.
Aurora and Max are... well, the same as always. I mean, they’ve been orbiting each other forever, and nothing ever really changes there—unless you count the fact that Abigail Evans decided to swoop back into town from New York. And not justanywhere—she’s working at the Bayview Opera House now. We ran into her the night we went to Maggie’s spring dance recital, and let’s just say the air in the lobby got about ten degrees colder the second Max spotted her.
So yeah, if you ignore the resurrection of the great, messy love triangle between Aurora, Max and Abigail, then everything’s the same.
Well, almost. One actually important thing: Max has been helping to organize Emily Powell’s 2025 U.S. tour. And not just the logistics—he’s making sure everything’s set so that Vincent can open for her once he’s ready to come back. Even while Vincent’s away, Max is pulling strings, making phone calls, doing the behind-the-scenes grind so that his friend won’t lose his shot.
That’s Max for you—chaos in his love life, total professional when it comes to making sure Vincent’s music career doesn’t slip through his fingers.
The bond between Vincent and Max is something I can’t quite put into words. There’s a deep respect between them—one of those things you have to witness to truly understand. I don’t think my boyfriend would have trusted anyone else to help plan the opportunity of his life. He respects Max and his work more than almost anything else.
Emily Powell is the biggest pop star of the moment, and she personally asked Vincent to open for twenty-five of her shows once she’s back from the european dates.
I don’t really know much about her—she’s always struck me as a very private person, especially when it comes to her personal life. Most of what I know comes from the media: her father’s American, her mother’s Indian, and she quietly supports several charities— Asha for Education, RAINN, Planned Parenthood, Gaza Mental Health Foundation, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and NAMI. Max said he could tellthat she and Vincent would get along well, both professionally and personally. He mentioned it after meeting her to discuss the dates and logistics of her tour with him.
I always knew it. I could feel it in my bones, in my blood, in my heart—there’s a rockstar inside Vincent Cooper.
And yet, even knowing he’s finally putting his mental and physical health first, the ache of missing him hasn’t lessened. I want to see him. I want his letters to arrive faster. I want more than two calls a week. I want him.
But I also know that when he comes back, he’ll be untouchable. His fears will be distant echoes he’ll finally be able to laugh at. He’ll be everything he’s always dreamed of being—everything he already is, even if he doesn’t see it yet.
What about me? Well, I’m trying to follow his example.
Three months ago, I left college. I invested a large amount of my trust fund into hiring a lawyer—one good enough to help me track down my brother and fight to bring him back, while Sam helps me search for both him and my mother.
Now, I sit in the waiting room of Dr. Wright’s office, Maggie beside me, rereading Vincent’s latest letter for the hundredth time. He wrote about group therapy, about pet therapy with a horse he namedSpirit. His words ground me, but they also make me ache.
Dr. Wright has been treating me for two and a half months now. She’s a colleague of Vincent’s father and Dr. Jenkins. She diagnosed me with something called masked depression—a form that hides behind atypical behavior, where the person seems “fine” on the outside but isn’t.
She believes much of it stems from my personality, from my instinct to act like the eldest sibling who has to carry everyone else. That same instinct keeps me from admitting thatIneed care too.
The truth is harder to face: my father always knew what my mother did to me. It’s obvious. Bruises aren’t normal. Fear’s not normal.
He knew, and he did nothing. I have to admit it. And so, I have to let it all go—of my father, of the man I thought he was when I was a kid, of the disgusting man he actually was, of my mother, her insults, her projections, her fears.
It’s not easy. Accepting I’m not a hopeless case feels like trying to learn a new language. I’ve always found comfort in self-pity, in believing her when she saidIwas the problem, and nothing could fix me. But my heart and my mind are slowly learning a new truth: the problem was never me.
And I’m working on it. One day at a time.
I want to be better—for Vincent, for my friends, for Asher. Most of all, for myself. Maybe I don’t know who I am yet. But I’m ready to find out. Mistakes, slammed doors, setbacks—it doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is me.
