He doesn’t say goodbye.
Doesn’t look back.
And somehow, that hurts more than anything he could have said.
Because I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That he’d linger. That he’d hesitate. That I’d still matter to him, even a little bit.
But he walks out.
The door closes with a soft click, leaving me alone with a sleeping dog and the crushing realization that Rowan King isn’t the boy I fell in love with anymore.
He’s something else entirely.
Something that still knows exactly how to hurt me.
Chapter Four
Rowan
Desperation has a smell.
And this guy reeks.
Axe body spray applied in a panic. He’s trying to mask the fear, which is adorable in a car crash kind of way.
A rookie mistake, though.
The fear always leaks through.
He’s young. Mid-twenties, maybe. Still has that baby-faced look that law school stress hasn’t sanded down yet. Hair too neat, shoes too clean, voice trembling because he still believes law school is about learning instead of surviving. Still operating under the illusion that panic is a private experience. That if you just sit still enough, quietly enough, the academic wolves won’t sniff you out.
He hasn’t figured it out yet.
Havemeyer Law School doesn’t break you in one clean snap.
It peels you. Each layer stripped away until you’re raw, exposed, and too embarrassed to cry in public. Then it salts the wound with a syllabus, a forced curve, and a professor who asks trick questions for sport.
He clears his throat.
I don’t look up.
But he talks anyway.
“I didn’t mean to leave it open,” he blurts, voice already cracking. “It was a shared desktop. My draft was on the cloud. Someone else turned it in, and now I’m being flagged.”
He leans in, and his fingers twitch, caught between folding neatly and tearing themselves apart.
“I’m on scholarship,” he adds. “If I get written up again, I’ll lose everything.”
Everything.
That word always gets me.
As if they’ve lived long enough to understand what everything is.
You lose a scholarship? You move home. You work a summer job you hate. You go to community college for a semester and pretend it’s temporary.
You don’t unravel.
