Chapter 4
One afternoon, I followed Olivia again and found her cornering him outside his classroom.
“We’re running out of time!” she hissed. “My father’s debt collectors are coming back. If you don’t make your move on Claire, what am I supposed to do?”
Lucas’s hand tightened around the pen he was holding.
“I like Claire,” he said suddenly.
Olivia stared at him.
I went still behind the wall.
He laughed once, bitterly, like he hated the sound of his own voice. “That’s what I said.”
She looked as if she might scream. “You’re my boyfriend.”
“Were,” he said.
“You’re saying this because she pulled away!”
“No,” he snapped. “I’m saying it because I finally understand what I destroyed.”
My chest hurt in a way I despised.
What was the point of this realization now? After betrayal. After greed. After my father’s death. After that anniversary morning when he handed me divorce papers and let me fall into the dark believing I had imagined our entire marriage?
He loved me.
Maybe he did.
But love that arrives only after it has ruined you is still ruin.
I stepped back before they could hear me.
At the corner of the building, Ethan was waiting again.
He did not ask what I had heard. He only looked at my face and said, “Come on.”
That became his way of caring for me.
No pressure. No prying. Just presence.
If I was spiraling, he steadied me. If I was angry, he stood close enough to remind me I was not alone in it.
Once, after a nightmare so vivid it left me shaking and sick, I knocked on his bedroom door at three in the morning with a pillow clutched to my chest.
He opened it half-asleep, took one look at me, and went fully alert.
“I had a bad dream,” I said.
He stepped aside instantly.
I did not even ask. I climbed straight into his bed.
He stared at me like I had just set the room on fire.
“Claire.”
“I’m not doing anything weird,” I muttered, already pulling the blanket up to my chin. “I just want to sleep somewhere safe.”
For a second, he looked completely helpless. Then he exhaled, rough and low. “I’ll take the chair.”
I reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Don’t.”
He went rigid.
“Just stay,” I whispered. “Please.”
After a long, impossible silence, he sat on the edge of the bed with his back to me.
I must have fallen asleep eventually, because when dawn crept into the room, he was still there. Same position. Same quiet watchfulness. As though he had spent the whole night guarding something fragile.
At breakfast, Dad took one look at Ethan’s dark circles, then at me, and nearly choked trying not to grin.
I kicked his shin under the table.
He laughed harder.
Life began changing in bigger ways after that.
Because Ethan asked me for money.
I was half-sick with a cold the day he knocked on my door, a bruise still dark under one eye from another round with school bullies when Mr. Ruiz had not been there to intercept them in time.
He checked my temperature with the back of his hand first, because of course he did, and only then said, “Can you lend me something?”
“For what?”
He hesitated. “A company.”
I blinked. “You want to start a company?”
He nodded once.
In my first life, the money I saved had gone to Lucas for college, then disappeared into marriage, shared accounts, and excuses. This time, I handed my savings to Ethan without a second thought.
“Then I’m investing,” I said.
He looked at me carefully. “You trust me that much?”
I met his gaze. “More than you know.”
He built an e-sports startup with that money and six boys who looked barely old enough to drive but had talent, nerve, and total faith in him. It sounds ridiculous now, saying it out loud, but those late nights, those tournaments, those tiny sponsorships—they became the beginning of everything.
By senior spring, the future had gone completely off script.
Olivia lost her social standing trying to smear me. She kept making little cutting comments about how spoiled I was, how dramatic, how controlling, until a classmate finally snapped at her in front of everyone and told her to stop acting like a snake. By graduation, almost no one wanted anything to do with her.
She failed to get into college.
Lucas still made it. He worked after school, loading boxes behind a grocery store for cash instead of trying to seduce me for access. The first time I saw him there, sweat-soaked and exhausted, lifting cases of beer onto a truck for eighty dollars, I stood in the shadows and watched.
In another life, that would have moved me.
This time I only thought, Good. At least you’re standing on your own feet.
Ethan found me there, of course. He always seemed to know when I was lingering too long in a memory.
“Do you feel sorry for him?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. I think this is the first decent choice he’s made.”
That night, after celebrating with Ethan’s new team at a little noodle place downtown, we stood on the balcony outside my room, sharing the last warmth of early summer.
I looked at the sky and asked, “Do you like the stars or the moon?”
“The moon,” he said.
“Why?”
He was quiet for so long I thought he would not answer.
Then he said softly, “Because I have my own moonlight to protect.”
I stopped breathing for a second.
I had spent years believing love was supposed to arrive loudly. Grand confessions. Flowers. Public declarations. A pretty poor boy under a sky full of stars asking the rich girl to take his hand.
But with Ethan, love came like this—through a glass of water when I was studying too late, through corrected notes slipped under my door, through silent loyalty, through bruised knuckles and tired eyes and unwavering presence.
It was the kind of love that showed up.