I stared at the screen. The small text glowing in the fading light.
Liam
Yeah. Meeting was fine. Still on.
Emily
Great! I'm excited. What time should I be ready?
Liam
I'll pick you up at 5:30
Emily
Perfect ??
The heart emoji sat there on the screen like a tiny accusation.
Everything I was supposed to want. The girlfriend. The date. The normal Saturday night at a mixer where I'd smile and make small talk and be Liam Moore, Riverside rower, Emily's boyfriend. The version of me that everyone expected. The version that made sense.
And Alex would be there all night. Watching. Knowing what I'd done. Knowing what I'd chosen.
What am I doing?
I shoved my phone back in my pocket and kept walking.
The sidewalk stretched ahead, shadows lengthening across the concrete. Campus wasn't far. Fifteen minutes. I could get back to my dorm, sit at my desk, stare at my laptop. Pretend to study while the image of Alex's face played on repeat behind my eyes—that half-second of devastation before the mask snapped back into place.
I'd hurt him. Not with cruelty, not with malice—with something worse. With carelessness. With the specific cowardice of someone who kept two doors open because he was too afraid to walk through either one.
My body knew what it wanted and known since the first day on Brackett Lake when Alex had looked at me across the water and something in my chest had shifted permanently.
But knowing and admitting were different things. And the distance between them was filling up with people I was hurting.
Saturday. The mixer. Emily on my arm. Alex across the room.
The thought made me physically sick—not the mixer itself, but the performance of it. The smiling. The pretending. The elaborate fiction that everything was fine while the person I'd hurt most stood twenty feet away, watching me choose someone else for the second time.
My feet carried me forward. One step after another. The only thing I knew how to do.
Keep moving. Keep pretending. Keep going.
Until something changed.
Chapter 12: Alex
The morning was perfect for rowing. Cool air, flat water, just enough light breaking over the horizon to see by. Mist sat low on the river in thin bands, burning off where the sun hit. The kind of conditions that should have made everything feel easy.
It didn't.
The Kingswell dock was crowded—both teams milling in the grey dawn, breath fogging, hands wrapped around oar shafts. Riverside guys clustered near the far end, Kingswell near the boathouse doors. The joint practices had a rhythm now but it was still uneasy, like two magnets held close with the wrong poles facing.
Coach Eldridge's voice carried across the dock from the launch. "Harrington and Moore, you're in a double."
My stomach dropped.
Of course. Testing whether Monday's chemistry was real or a fluke.
