Chapter3

The next day, my right arm was wrapped in gauze.

Dressed in an evening gown, I sat all alone at the front-row round table inside the fraternity banquet hall. It was the most highly anticipated gala of the year, the exact night Chase had promised to slip a "promise ring" on my finger in front of the entire campus.

All around me, the hall buzzed, packed with sorority girls in haute couture and varsity football players. I had been sitting there, utterly stranded, for three solid hours.

"Straight to voicemail," a wide receiver sitting next to me said. He lowered his phone and shot me a sympathetic look. "Harper, they're about to start the ring exchange. Chase is nowhere to be found. Are you seriously going to keep waiting?"

"He'll be here," I said, my eyes fixed intensely on the entrance. "He promised me." In my head, I counted prime numbers for the hundredth time, my fingers blindly tracing the edges of the blurry, old wedding photograph hidden in the pocket of my gown.

Suddenly, the massive projector screen, which had been looping highlight reels from past years, flickered. Someone in the AV booth must have slipped, accidentally switching the feed to a trending live stream on the campus network.

The deafening chatter of the hall dropped into instant, dead silence.

Every single head turned in unison toward the screen. I twisted around, my body going incredibly stiff.

It was the hallway of the campus hospital's ER. The camera frame wobbled; it was clearly a secret broadcast from someone's phone.

Chase was half-kneeling beside a hospital bed. Lying there, strapped to an oxygen mask, was Mia. She had just suffered a "panic attack" the night before, and now she was back in the ER for "hyperventilation."

"Chase, you need to go back. Today is your promise ceremony..." Through the screen, Mia, her voice muffled by the oxygen mask, weakly pushed at Chase's arm. "Harper already hates me. If you don't show up, she's definitely going to bully me again."

Chase gripped Mia's hand fiercely. He suddenly leaned down, pressing his lips heavily against her forehead.

"To hell with the promise ceremony! To hell with that damn ring!" Chase growled low. "If Harper wants to throw a fit, let her! Listen to me, Mia. In my heart, you are the most important girl in my life."

Cruel snickers erupted around me in the banquet hall. A few people even pulled out their phones, aiming their lenses right at my face.

The burn on my right arm flared with an agonizing pain.

I stared at the bone pendant necklace exposed on Chase's neck on the screen. All those promises. All that talk about how he would fall in love with me in the future. It was all a lie.

I ripped the corsage from my chest, spun around on my high heels, and bolted out of the banquet hall without looking back.

A blizzard was raging outside. I sprinted blindly through the snowstorm toward the 24-hour Ivy Diner on the corner.

The moment I pushed open the diner's glass doors, I realized the place was completely empty. Except for him—the gray-haired man in the sharp charcoal suit. He sat in the furthest corner booth, a steaming cup of hot black coffee resting in front of him. He looked exactly as if he had anticipated my arrival all along.

I marched over and slammed both hands onto his table.

"You lied to me." I stared dead into his eyes.

"You didn't show up! You abandoned me to go kiss another woman in the hospital! You made a complete joke out of me in front of the entire campus!"

I pulled that crumpled, old wedding photograph from my pocket and smashed it onto the table. "You said you would fall in love with me! Where is this damn future you promised? Why the hell did you make me endure this humiliation like a dog?"

The man didn't say a single word. Instead, he slowly reached out with his left hand, effortlessly slicing off a piece of the dessert in front of him.

"Harper, I never lied to you." He brought the dessert to his mouth with his left hand, swallowing it slowly. "Have something sweet. This was what we ate most often on snowy days after we got married. Your favorite, peanut butter pie."

My breath hitched, stopping completely.

His left hand. The peanut butter pie.

Agonizingly slowly, my gaze shifted from the left hand holding the fork, down to the thick, rich peanut butter smeared across the pie on the plate.

Chase was right-handed. And the most fatal detail of all... Chase was highly allergic to peanuts.

Trembling all over, I looked up at the old man sitting across from me. "You aren't Chase..."

"Who the hell are you?"

The man set down his fork gently, his eyes fixed on me with absolute tenderness. "I never once said I was him."