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He would have hated the cheap halogen glare and the smell of concession popcorn. He would have leaned his shoulder against mine, complaining loudly about the squeak of rubber on hardwood just to get a rise out of me, before getting fiercely, embarrassingly invested in the game. He would have screamed at the referees, cursed in Russian, and gripped my knee every time the score got close.

And then the bitter, sickening reality crashes back in: even before the breakup, Maksim would never have been allowed to sit beside me here.

Not in the light. Not where people could see.

I had kept him tucked away in the dark, trapped in secret apartments, hidden behind closed doors and tinted windows, treating the most brilliant, vibrant thing in my life like a dirty secret. I forced him to love me in whispers, and then I stood by and let him believe he was disposable when the walls closed in.

Three months.

Ninety-two days of absolute, deafening silence.

People think grief is something that softens with time, but these three months have been an agonizing, slow-motion mutilation. It’s waking up at three in the morning and reaching for a body that isn’t there. It’s walking into the apartment and choking on the phantom scent of his Amber cologne and turpentine. It’s seeing his clothes folded in the back of my closet and feeling an ache in my sternum so sharp it brings me to my knees.

I thought the first week without him would be the worst. I was wrong. The first week was shock. The second was anger. The third was the beginning of understanding what I had actually done. By the fourth, I had stopped expecting the pain to lessen simply because time was passing. It didn’t. If anything, it became more precise.

At first, I missed having him beside me. Then I began missing specific things. The sound of his laugh when something genuinely caught him off guard. The way he would crawl into bed without asking and steal half my pillow despite having an entire side of the bed available to him. The way he would complain that I was too serious and then spend ten minutes deliberately provoking me until I finally smiled.

I miss opening the door after a long day and finding him there, usually barefoot, usually wearing one of my shirts, usually looking at me as though my arrival had been the most important event of his day. I miss being wanted by him. I miss being bombarded by him. Most of all, I miss the certainty I once had that when I reached for him, he would be there.

I know where he is.

I have known all three months. I know he went with Dante. I know he stayed in Tuscany, then moved to Positano, then Sicily, and now Portofino. I know he has been painting. I know he has been going out, exploring, living. I know he has barely spoken to anyone back home. And I know Dante has been by his side through most of it.

I have no right to be jealous of Dante.

That is the truth I repeat whenever the jealousy comes.

I have no right.

I was the one who ended us. I was the one who looked him in the eyes and told him I was going back to Jake. I was the one who stood there while the person I loved was breaking in front of me and convinced myself that letting him hate me was preferable to letting him die because of me. Whatever Dante has given him, whatever happiness he has found in Italy, whatever memories they have made together, I have no claim over any of it. I surrendered that claim the moment I chose silence.

And yet knowing I deserve this doesn’t make it hurt less. It only makes the pain harder to resent. The truth is, I don’t know if I have ever felt grief like this.

I have lost people before. I have experienced death. I have experienced disappointment, betrayal, failure. I know what it means to lose something important. But losing Maksim is different because he is still alive somewhere. He is walking around under the same sky. He exists, and yet he is inaccessible to me.

There is something uniquely cruel about grieving someone who is still alive.

You can’t bury them.

You can’t say goodbye.

You simply wake up every morning knowing the person you love is somewhere in the world, living a life you are no longer part of.

Yes, I am in love with Maksim Petrov. I don’t know when or how it happened. I just know I’m head over heels in love with my spitfire.

The final buzzer blares across the arena, a deafening blast that signals the end of the game, and the entire gymnasium erupts into sheer pandemonium.

The student section surges forward, screams shaking the bleachers, as Jamie and his teammates swarm the center of the hardwood. They collide in a chaotic, jumping huddle—shoving, shouting, chests heaving with victorious exhaustion. They won.

Jamie breaks out of the pack, grinning ear to ear, his jersey soaked in sweat. He instinctively scans the lower bleachers, looking for me. When our eyes lock, his face is radiating pure, unfiltered triumph, and I force myself to give him a genuine nod and a small, supportive smile.

Then Jamie’s gaze drifts past my shoulder into the aisle above, and his face freezes. The broad, cocky smile drops in a fraction of a second, replaced by pure, paralysing shock. His mouth falls open, his chest pausing mid-heave, as his eyes widen in complete disbelief at whoever he’s just seen.

Before I can even process the shift, the shock on my brother’s face melts into something so raw, so violently bright with genuine joy, then he lifts both hands high above his head. His fingers curve and twist in rapid succession, flashing an intricate hand sign toward the stands.

My heart spikes violently against my ribs.

There is only one person on the entire planet Jamie would make that sign for. It’s the secret, ridiculous signal he and Maksim created when they were kids—a code they used to communicate across crowded family dinners, across halls, across every room where they weren’t supposed to be talking.