Chapter 3

Hazel's POV

I'm almost at the front gate when a car screeches to a stop right in front of me.

The door swings open and a man steps out, moving fast, jaw set, expression unreadable.

It's my brother, Lucas.

He's six years older than me. He's the one who got us out, away from parents who saw us as a meal ticket. He put himself through one of the top law schools in the country on nothing but hard work and stubbornness, and now he's one of the most sought-after trial attorneys on the East Coast.

He's been traveling for work constantly, all so I could stay in school.

Last night I called him. He picked up, said hello, and I just stood there. I couldn't get a single word out. I hung up without saying anything. I didn't think he'd actually come.

"Hazel?" Lucas takes one look at my hair, at my face, and his eyes go sharp.

He grabs my shoulders, his gaze moving quickly over my neck, my arms.

"Who did this to you?" His voice is flat. Cold.

I look at him, and whatever I've been holding together since last night just lets go.

The tears come before I can stop them.

"Can we just leave? Please. I don't want to be here anymore."

Lucas doesn't ask anything. He doesn't push.

He takes off his jacket and wraps it around me, pulling me in close.

"Okay. We're leaving."

He takes my hand and walks me out of that place. The school that swallowed seven years of my life.

The sun hits my face when we step outside. I don't think I've taken a full breath in a very long time.

Lucas doesn't waste any time.

By that afternoon, we're gone. New state. The place we actually came from, before everything went wrong.

My parents call while we're on the road. My father's voice comes through the phone loud enough that I have to hold it away from my ear. He's furious. Says I disrespected Preston, cost them their jobs, ruined everything.

"You ungrateful little brat. You get back there and fix this with Preston right now. Do you have any idea what you've cost us?"

I wait until he finishes. Then I calmly hit record, and I say: "There's fifteen thousand dollars in my account. It's everything I've saved. I'm sending it to you. After that, consider yourself childless."

I hang up. I block the number.

Just because we share blood doesn't mean I owe them anything. I'm done being something people drain.

A week later, Lucas pulls some strings and gets me enrolled at Riverside Magnet High, the best public school in the area.

New place. New people. No one who knows my name, no one who answers to Preston Maddox.

It already feels different.

"You can take that open seat by the window," the teacher says, pointing to the back of the room.

I head over and sit down.

The guy next to me has his head down, working through what looks like a brutal physics problem. The light coming through the blinds catches the side of his face, the clean line of his jaw.

He looks up when he hears me settle in.

Calm eyes. Steady. The kind that don't need to prove anything.

"Sebastian Ashford." His voice is easy, unhurried.

"Hazel Calloway."

Sebastian is different in a way that takes me a while to place.

He's the best student in the school, top of every class, but he doesn't carry it like a trophy. There's no edge to him, no performance.

He just has this thing about boundaries. About not pushing into spaces he wasn't invited into.

When my pen rolls off the desk, he picks it up with a piece of paper between his fingers and sets it back without making it a thing.

One afternoon I start to lose it in the study room, walls feeling too close, chest too tight. He doesn't say anything. He just gets up, pushes the window open, and puts a mint on the edge of my desk.

"You don't have to push through it," is all he says. Then he goes back to reading.

No pity. No performance. Just quiet, straightforward respect.

Seven years with Preston, and I never once felt like that.

So this is what normal looks like.

Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away at Westbrook, Preston is losing it.

Two weeks without a good morning text from me. Two weeks of not seeing me waiting outside his classroom, ready to fall in line.

He tells himself I'm throwing a fit. That I'll come crawling back once I run out of options.

"She'll be back," he says, laughing it off in front of his friends. "She's got nowhere else to go."

But one day passes. Then two. Then a week.

My Instagram is gone. My number doesn't go through anymore.

I've disappeared completely from his world, like I was never there.

And something that feels a lot like panic sets in for the first time in his life.