Chapter 2

I stared at the black polyester of my graduation gown hanging on the door. The crisp fabric caught the dim light of my bedroom. A sharp pain clamped down on my chest. I gripped the edge of my desk until my knuckles turned white. My mind dragged me back three years, to the exact moment Liam forged the chains I willingly wrapped around myself.

Freshman year. The campus parking lot.

I walked across the crosswalk, my arms loaded with heavy math competition binders. A black SUV sped around the corner. The driver lost control. The tires shrieked against the asphalt. The grill of the car barreled straight toward me.

Someone slammed into my shoulder.

Liam tackled me onto the concrete curb. The SUV blew past us, missing my legs by inches. We hit the ground hard. My binders scattered. Liam took the brunt of the fall. He groaned and rolled onto his back, clutching his right arm.

At the emergency room, the doctor delivered the verdict. A fractured radius. Six weeks in a cast. The doctor looked at me and stated the facts. One second later, the SUV would have crushed my ribcage.

Liam sat on the examination table. The nurse finished wrapping the thick white plaster around his forearm. He held it up and flashed me a bright, crooked smile.

"This cast looks like a wedding band, doesn't it?" Liam laughed. "Maybe we're destined to be together."

Heat rushed to my face. My heart hammered against my ribs, entirely bypassing logic. He bled for me. He broke his bones for me. In that sterile hospital room, Liam secured a permanent, untouchable pedestal in my mind.

I spent the next two years paying off that debt.

Liam lived in a cramped apartment on the edge of town. His father lost his construction job. His mother worked three part-time shifts just to keep the electricity on. They offered him zero academic support. He wanted a ticket out. I handed him mine.

I drained my own savings. I paid for his Princeton Review SAT prep courses. I bought him the two-hundred-dollar AP textbooks. I ate the school cafeteria’s cheapest dollar-menu sandwiches while I mapped out his academic trajectory.

I tutored him every single afternoon. I dragged him through foundational mathematics. I hammered calculus theorems into his head. We moved to linear algebra, then physics mechanics, then the molecular structure in chemistry.

During a late-night biology session, we sat close together in the empty science lab. We studied genetics. The only sound was the hum of the overhead fluorescent lights.

Liam leaned over the lab bench. His shoulder brushed mine. He looked at the Punnett squares on my worksheet, then looked directly into my eyes.

"Chloe," he whispered. "Looks like our kids would definitely inherit your brain." He paused, letting the silence stretch. "I mean, when we have kids someday."

The air in the lab thickened. The tension crackled between us. He never formally asked me to be his girlfriend. He never needed to. I accepted the role. I accepted every midnight call, every panicked text before a quiz, every subtle hint about our shared future. I gave him everything.

The strategy worked. By the end of our sophomore year, Liam’s grades skyrocketed. He broke into the top fifteen percent of our class. He started matching my scores on the standardized practice tests. I looked at his report card and felt a fierce, burning pride. I built him.

Then senior fall arrived, and Madison transferred from the Upper East Side.

The shift happened fast. Madison brought designer bags, weekend trips to the Hamptons, and an entourage. Liam’s focus fractured.

During our study sessions, his phone buzzed constantly. He stared at the screen instead of the derivations on the whiteboard.

"I need a social break, Chloe," he said one Tuesday, packing his bag forty minutes early.

He started canceling our weekend study sessions. He blamed track practice. He blamed family emergencies. He arrived late and left early. His temper shortened.

"You're too intense about everything," Liam snapped at me during a calculus review in November. He threw his pencil onto the desk. "You're like some kind of perfectionist machine. Madison actually knows how to have fun. She enjoys life."

The word machine stung. A hot spike of anger flared in my gut, but I swallowed it down. I rationalized his behavior. The SATs approached. The pressure mounted.

"Standardized tests don't care about fun, Liam," I replied, keeping my voice level. "They care about correct answers. This is your way out. Remember?"

"Yeah, yeah. I know," he muttered.

He rolled his eyes. I saw the flash of impatience. I saw the contempt. I chose to ignore it and pushed the worksheet back across the table.

My willful blindness shattered in the spring.

Liam’s GPA tanked. He dropped to a 3.2. He cornered me in the empty hallway outside the counselor's office. His eyes were red. Tears spilled over his eyelashes and tracked down his cheeks. His hands shook.

"I'm ruined, Chloe," he choked out. "My MIT Early Decision application is dead. My dad is going to kill me. I have nothing."

It was the first time I saw him completely vulnerable since the hospital room. The sight of his tears broke my defenses. The MIT deadline loomed forty-eight hours away.

I walked into the computer lab. I logged into the national science committee portal. I opened my quantum algorithm project—the project I spent four hundred hours coding in isolation. I clicked the authorship tab. I typed Liam's legal name. I designated him as the primary co-author.

I handed him the printed confirmation sheet.

"Keep this quiet," I ordered him, my voice trembling with the weight of what I just sacrificed. "Do not tell anyone about the authorship change. Submit it with your application."

He hugged me. He kissed my forehead. He called me his savior.

My phone vibrated against the wood of my desk, snapping me out of the memory.

I blinked hard. The phantom warmth of his kiss vanished, replaced by a cold, violent fury. My chest heaved. I grabbed the phone.

The Instagram interface glitched. The screen went white for a fraction of a second. The app refreshed.

The hashtag #PrepSchoolDrama remained, but the UI changed. The pink ring around Liam’s profile picture at the top of my screen disappeared. His Stories vanished. His profile picture turned into a blank gray circle. User not found.

A harsh, bitter laugh scraped its way out of my throat.

He finally remembered to block me. He sat at the senior party, probably with Madison’s arms wrapped around his neck, and realized his digital footprint exposed him. He scrambled to cover his tracks. He thought a simple block button could shut me out of his reality.

He thought he won.

He operated on outdated data. He thought I was still the girl in the parking lot, forever indebted to his broken arm. He thought I was still the machine who would quietly absorb his insults and write his essays.

My fingers tightened around the phone. The glass screen protector cracked under the pressure of my thumb.

I set the phone down. I walked back to the door and ran my hand over the dark fabric of the graduation gown.

Tomorrow morning, Liam will put on his own gown. He will walk across the stage expecting a crown. Instead, he will step onto a landmine.