I didn't react. Not at first. I couldn't. The words didn't feel real. Like I'd heard them through water, or glass.
Then, slowly, I whispered:
"Is it Selene?"
He shut his eyes. "Nothing happened. I swear to you, nothing happened. But... yeah. It's her."
I waited.
"I didn't expect it. I thought it was in the past. But when I saw her, it all came back so fast. And now I'm caught in this place where I don't know what's real. I want to do the right thing—I'm your fiancé. I love you. I owe it to you, to us, to figure this out. But I can't marry you when someone else is in my head."
I stared at him like he was a stranger.
Like the man I was going to marry had died, and this ghost was trying to justify the killing, and that's exactly what it felt like. A death.
Not mine.His.
The man I loved—the man who once courted me with handwritten notes tucked into my coat pockets, who waited outside my dance classes with takeout and flowers "just because"—he was gone. The man who would text me midday just to say he missed me, who made me playlists for every season,who spent a whole weekend repainting the living room because I once said I missed the color of sunflowers.
He decorated our home like it was a temple to joy—to me. Little gold suns in every room. A bright yellow kettle. A framed photo of us at the lake, captioned in his handwriting:My sunshine.
He even tattooed a small sun on his wrist. He told me, "You're the only constant in my sky."
I cried the day he did it. He kissed my tears and said, "You light up everything."
This was the man who planned his proposal with every detail mapped out—whocalled my oddball best friendsmonths in advance to make sure they could fly in. Who built me a dance studio with his own hands. Whoinvestedin it because he believed in me even before I did.
He used to light up every time he saw me. Even if it had been an hour. His face would soften, and he'd open his arms like the world made sense again because I was in it.
Where did he go?
How did he forget me so easily?
How did I go from being his sun to being a shadow?
Now he won't even touch me. He doesn't look at me like I'm the light anymore—he looks at me like I'm in the way.
How does love just...stop?
It didn't make sense. Itstilldoesn't. So I knew I was going to mourn. Not the relationship. Not the wedding. I will mournhim—the version of Aaron who made me feel like the most beloved person on this earth. The one who promised forever with stars inhis eyes. Because whoever this is, this quiet, evasive man full of guilt and hesitation and excuses—he's not the one who asked me to be his wife.
That man is gone and the grief of it... I don't think I've ever known pain like this, and just like that, I turned and walked out of the apartment we built together.
Chapter Three: Worth It
I didn't knock.
May's studio door flew open with a slam and startled her enough to drop a brush into a smear of cerulean blue.
"June?" she blinked, bleary-eyed, paint on her sleeve. "What—?"
"I CAN'T—" My voice broke before the rest could come out. "I CAN'T DO THIS!"
She rushed forward as I collapsed onto her paint-streaked couch, tears finally forcing their way out, unstoppable, furious.
"I gave him everything," I sobbed, "everything. My time, my trust—my future! And he just—he justsits thereand tells me he needstime?"
May crouched beside me, her hand trembling as it touched my back.
