At the far end of the hall, all we saw was a door swinging shut. The echo of it closing seemed to stretch, bouncing off the walls until it faded completely.
Garrett frowned. “You think someone heard us?”
I forced a shrug, my throat tight. “Doesn’t matter.”
But the hollow feeling in my gut said otherwise.
He nodded slowly but didn’t say anything else. We walked into class in silence after that, my pulse still pounding in my ears.
The anger didn’t fade; it just sat there, heavy and sour, until I couldn’t tell if I was mad at my dad, at my stalker…or at myself.
My phone buzzed again, another text from my dad. This time it was a link to some expensive fishing gear he didn’t need and wouldn’t use.
Dad: Think you could grab this for me, champ?
The message sat beneath it like it was nothing, like he hadn’t just asked me to send him thousands of dollars.
I stared at the screen until everything else—the professor’s drone, Garrett, that faint sob—faded into the background.
The phone screen went dark, and for a second, it felt like I did, too.
CHAPTER 5
OPHELIA
His words hit before I could prepare for them.
“Why the hell would I care what some clingy, desperate freak wants? She’s probably just another attention-starved girl with no life, following guys around because she’s too pathetic to get one of her own.”
For a second, I couldn’t breathe. The sound of his voice, sharp, irritated, careless, echoed down the hall and straight through me. I didn’t wait to hear anything else. My feet moved before my brain could, carrying me in the opposite direction, fast enough that the edges of my vision blurred.
By the time I reached the end of the corridor, my chest was burning. I pushed through the nearest door without looking, into an empty study room. The lights were dim, the air still, and the moment the door clicked shut behind me, the world tilted.
A sob tore out of my throat before I could stop it. Then another. I pressed my back against the wall and slid down until I hit the floor, my knees pulled tight to my chest. The words wouldn’t stop replaying.Clingy. Desperate. Pathetic.Each one landed like a stone thrown straight into my ribs.
I wanted to unhear it, to pretend he hadn’t said it, but the sound of his voice was everywhere—inside me, around me,filling the room until it felt like it was breaking me open from the inside out.
My hands were shaking so hard I pressed them to my mouth just to quiet the sound of my crying. The tears came faster anyway, hot and endless, dripping down my chin.
I’d known he didn’t see me. It had happened a thousand times. But hearing him say it, hearing the disgust in his voice…it felt like being gutted.
And the worst part was…
I agreed with him.
I don’t know how long I stayed there. Minutes. Hours. Long enough for my tears to dry and my body to ache from the way I’d curled into myself on the cold tile. My throat was raw, my face sticky, and I felt hollow—like someone had scooped out everything inside me and left only the echo of his voice behind.
Eventually, I forced myself to move. My limbs were heavy and uncooperative, like they didn’t want to belong to me anymore. I pushed myself off the floor and stumbled toward the door, wiping at my face with trembling hands. The hallway outside was quiet now and mercifully empty. I kept my head down as I walked, one foot in front of the other, like maybe if I didn’t look up, no one would see how broken I was.
By the time I reached my dorm, my legs felt like they were made of glass. The key slipped in my shaking hand as I unlocked the door. The quiet hit me like a slap.
I lived alone. I’d made sure that I wouldn’t be assigned a roommate. I couldn’t risk anyone walking in and seeing the wall—the one that had become my secret, my shame, my shrine.
Posters. Printouts. Photos I’d taken from my phone, from the university website, from news articles. Notes I’d written after every game, every quote I’d memorized that he’d said. It covered the whole wall, stretching from the floor to the ceiling like a living thing made entirely of him.
And pinned near the center was the thing I was most ashamed of—a baseball cap with the Tigers logo stitched across the front. I’d taken it months ago after one of his interviews, when he’d set it down on a bench outside the locker room. It wasn’t planned. I’d just seen it sitting there, his name still Sharpied on the inside brim, and before I could think, it was in my bag. I’d told myself it didn’t count as stealing if he didn’t notice.
Now, as it stared back at me from the middle of the wall, the realization hit hard. The cap wasn’t some token of connection. It was evidence. Proof that I was doing it again.
