Chapter 13
I explained everything to Mia over noodles and iced soda.
She listened with the kind of scandalized delight only a best friend can sustain ethically.
“So let me get this straight,” she said finally, slamming a palm on the table. “That idiot saw your face once on a glitchy video call, decided you weren’t hot enough for his ego, and dumped you onto his traumatized rich roommate?”
I rubbed my forehead.
“When you say it like that, it sounds even more insane.”
“It is insane,” she said. “May he stay single forever.”
The remaining months of my exchange year passed in a rhythm that began to feel suspiciously like peace.
I went to class during the day.
At night, Adrian picked me up.
Sometimes he came all the way just to have dinner with me and drive me back.
Sometimes he stayed over and let me talk until midnight while he listened with that deep, impossible focus of his that made me feel like every word I said mattered.
When my exchange ended, I returned to my home university.
Adrian started making the long trip to see me, even though travel still exhausted him.
Eventually his grandmother looked at him over dinner and said dryly, “At this point, why don’t you just buy a place near Chloe and spare us all the drama?”
His eyes lit up.
“Good idea,” he said at once.
When he met my parents, he was so nervous I thought he might pass out.
My dad muttered, “No. Absolutely not. My daughter talks enough for three households. This boy can barely get a sentence out. She’ll die of boredom.”
My mom kicked him under the table.
“Quiet husbands are ideal,” she said grandly. “That’s called premium listening.”
Adrian sat there rigid as a board, then said with immense effort, “I can talk.”
That finished my mother completely. She adored him on the spot.
After graduation, we traveled together.
Nothing too overwhelming.
Nothing international yet.
Just beautiful places that let Adrian breathe.
We went to Yunnan—well, the American version of it, the kind of wild mountain trips and lake towns that felt like stepping out of regular life. We rented scooters by the water. Took ridiculous costume photos. Strangers kept asking where I had hired such a pretty male model.
I would point at him and say, “Five hundred dollars a picture.”
He would calmly pull my hand behind his back and keep walking.
Later, I joined the Quinn company as an intern.
Adrian found his own work too, slowly, carefully, on terms the world could not force.
As for Hudson, I heard that after the Quinns learned the full extent of what had happened, the resources and favors the Hales had been receiving dried up one by one.
The last thing I heard was that he left the country.
I did not ask where.
I did not care enough to know.