Chapter 2I'll Leave So You Can Be Happy

Three days later, Claire came back from her trip.

She came through the door pulling a brand-new suitcase, her skin sun-kissed and her face relaxed from the trip. She waved a small paper bag at me.

"I got you something."

It was a postcard of Santorini's blue-domed church, its corners carefully folded and the scent of sea air still clinging to it. Smiling, she said she had seen it in a souvenir shop and immediately thought of me.

I took it, thanked her quietly, and ran my fingers over the cool paper. I felt nothing.

At dinner Victoria mentioned something offhand that broke the quiet at the table.

"Funny thing, Logan brought me the exact same postcard this morning. He said a friend picked it up for him in Greece."

Claire's knife and fork froze in midair. She looked up at me, testing, clearly waiting for me to question her, to care, to get jealous and twisted up about it as I always had.

I just looked down and kept cutting the roast chicken on my plate, my voice level. "Souvenirs from places everyone posts about all look the same. It's normal."

If anything, my calm only made her face fall further.

Halfway through the meal, she said in a carefully casual tone, "Once school starts, I'm going to change my major to art history."

Before, that would have thrown me into a panic. I knew her gift was art and that she hated the tedium of coding, but I had selfishly told myself that as long as we were in the same school and the same city, nothing could come between us.

But this time I did not try to hold her back, and I was not thinking of myself. I said it plainly, "Then switch. What matters is doing what you love."

James nodded first, and Victoria smiled and agreed, saying she had known for years that Claire had real talent for drawing and that it suited her far better than grinding away at code.

Claire was the only one not smiling. She stared at me, her voice cooling, resentment buried just under it. "You're very generous all of a sudden."

"It's your life and your choice," I said calmly.

She set down her knife and fork and lowered her voice, unwilling to let the comparison go. "Logan never gives me polished little speeches like that. If he wants something, he just comes out and says it."

I said nothing. There was no point defending myself anymore.

Soon after, her phone lit up with a voice message from Logan. A range hood roared in the background beneath his helpless laugh.

"Claire, help. I burned the ribs to charcoal and filled the kitchen with smoke."

Claire was on her feet almost instantly, grabbing the car keys from the hall table without a second thought.

Victoria asked where she was going. Claire did not slow down. "Logan can't cook. I'm going to check on him."

The door clicked shut, and the house went quiet. I looked down at the bandage on my left hand, covering the cut I had given myself while chopping vegetables a few days earlier. The cut had bled badly.

I had called to her from the kitchen and asked her to grab some gauze from the first-aid kit. She had not even looked up. "Ethan, you're not a kid. You can handle it yourself."

Of course I knew how to handle a cut. I always had.

I just wanted, in that moment, to find out where exactly Logan and I stood in her mind.

The answer was blunt and cruel, and it took no digging at all.

Half an hour later, Logan posted on Instagram. In the photo, Claire wore his gray apron and bent to dump a tray of burned ribs into the trash, looking perfectly at ease.

The caption was cocky and suggestive: "my best friend's girl, obviously."

The comments filled with teasing about whether they were together. Logan soon denied it himself: "Don't start. She's going to marry my best friend."

It looked like he was drawing a line. In fact, every word of it announced to the world that whatever he and Claire had, nobody else could get in between.

I closed the app and opened the account from ten years ahead.

I typed slowly: "If that person had stepped aside from the beginning, would the two of you have been happy?"

After a long wait, my phone buzzed once.

It was one short line, and it stopped my breathing.

"At least I wouldn't keep dreaming that he died."

I stared at that line. My fingers went cold and the chill rolling up from my chest took over my whole body.

So the version of me ten years from now had not merely been abandoned. He had met a far more brutal, desperate end.

I screenshotted the conversation and saved it to a locked album. Outside, the night had deepened and the wind had turned cool. Normally, no matter how late it got, Claire would text to ask whether I had taken my medication and changed my dressing on time.

But that night she never came home, and there was not a single word from her.