For the first time, loving him doesn’t feel like losing myself.
It feels like choosing.
My phone buzzes on the hearth.
Dr. Bauer:“Emergency session?”
I almost text backyes.
But before I can type it, there's a knock at the side door. Not the front. The one that faces the woods. Only a few people even know it exists.
I tuck the letter into the folds of Leo’s coat and get up slowly, limbs aching. When I open the door, Tristan’s standing there, cheeks red from the cold, his hair messy like he ran a hand through it a hundred times on the walk over.
“Too late?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Too everything.”
He steps inside, not bothering to shake the snow off his boots, and just… looks at me.
“Leo texted me,” he says, voice low. “Said you were safe. I needed to see that for myself.”
I nod, my throat thick. “I don’t think I’m okay. I don’t know if I ever will be again.”
He looks at the couch, but I lead him to the two chairs by the fire. I sit, the coat still wrapped around me, his presence strangely comforting in a non-romantic, bone-deep kind of way.
“I set them up,” Tristan says, breaking the silence.
I blink. “What?”
“Not directly,” he admits. “But I knew. I knew what Nadia, Rosalie and her crew were planning. I figured they’d hang themselves if we just gave them enough rope. So I didn’t stop them. I planted a few ideas, maybe. Asked the right questions at the right time. Pretended to be neutral. Rosalie was pissed as fuck when Leo bagged as her date.”
“You used them.”
“I learned from the best,” he says with a sad smile. “You think people like me stay out of the line of fire by being sweet? Nah. We survive by being smarter than the game.”
I study him, the angles of his jaw, the guilt under his eyes.
“But that’s not why I’m here,” he adds. “I came to tell you about someone. Freshman year, I met a girl. Scholarship student. Brilliant. Played cello like she was born in a concert hall. I fell hard. She was… good. Too good for this place.”
I don’t speak. I let him get it out.
“They ruined her. The same group. Whispers, rumors, planted notes, messed with her locker. Drove her out by spring break. I tried to play both sides. I didn’t protect her. And by the time I realized I loved her… she was gone.”
“What happened to her?” I ask softly.
He pulls out his phone, shows me a photo of a girl in a field hockey uniform, smiling at the camera, messy braid over one shoulder.
“She’s back in the Midwest. Public school. New boyfriend. I check in sometimes… through a PI.”
“Tristan…”
“I know. Creepy, right? But I needed to know she was okay. And I swore if I ever got the chance to do it differently—I would.”
My eyes blur with tears again, but not from pain this time. From the unexpected grace of it.
“That’s why I’m fighting for you now, Jade,” he says, voice breaking. “I won’t screw it up again. I’m not Leo. I know that. I never will be. But I can be your friend. A good one.”
I reach for his hand and squeeze it. “Thank you.”
