“Don’t try to make me feel guilty for this.”
Fury ignited inside of me, flames stoked by indignation.
“You chose not to disclose any of this, and now I have to deal with the fallout. If I’d known, I could’ve adjusted my expectations. But this…” I shook my head. “This is unfair.”
My future had been thrown away before it even had a chance to start.
They’d spent everything. And they’d let me walk blind into heartbreak.
It wasn’t just about school. It was about playing. Competing. Winning. UCLA had one of the best volleyball programs in the country, and I’d been dreaming of wearing that jersey since I first touched a ball.
Volleyball wasn’t just a sport to me. It was my escape, my identity, my damn ticket out.
The following weeks had been a terrifying, maddening blur. A scramble to fix something I hadn’t broken. The game was ending too soon, and there wasn’t enough time left on the clock.
Pounding energy drinks, watching deadlines fly by, and staying up till 2 A.M. writing scholarship essays.
Begging my teachers and coaches for letters of recommendation at the last minute and having to endure their faces filled with pity when they realized what was going on.
I didn’t sleep for three weeks, just chased every maybe like it owed me something. And then … salvation. Beautiful, gratifying salvation.
BRU gave me a shot — saw my stats, my tapes, and threw me a lifeline. An athletic scholarship. Not because of my GPA or some touching essay.
Because I could play. Because volleyball still believed in me, even when everything else didn’t.
Relief that felt more like collapse than victory. Relief that left a sour taste, as my parents told our family and friends I’dchosenBRU. I wasn’t trying to be a bitch or ungrateful.
I got lucky. But I shouldn’t have had to.
Shaking my head, I tried to rid my mind of this memory. Compartmentalize. Everyone left eventually. Or lied. Or let you fall. That was the first time I stopped expecting anyone to catch me.
And yet, I had let someone get the better of me again. But this time I was going to do something about it.
My gaze flicked to my bed, under which I’d stashed the box containing the original acceptance letter from UCLA — a reminder that trust must be earned.
The files I was going through seemed promising. The folder had been buried so deep that I was sure it must contain something substantial.
Why else would it have been buried?
Clicking through financial documents, transaction logs, and a payment trail to shell accounts, one by one, I quickly became frustrated. Everything was convoluted and crisscrossed, leading me from one folder to the next and back again, like a fucking spiderweb.
I took a shaky breath and reached for my color-coded highlighters. Red meant confirmed shady. Orange was suspicious. Green was circumstantial.
If anyone walked in, they’d just see a girl being obsessive. They wouldn’t see the wreck I was trying to control underneath it all.
Either whoever set up these folders had absolutely no idea what they were doing — because this was pure chaos — or it was intentional. A means to waste someone’s time.
All those loops and redirects … could they really be a coincidence? I’d learned a long time ago that paranoia wasn’t just some personality quirk; it was a survival skill. If something felt off, it usually was.
You didn’t last long in the world of fake smiles by assuming the best in people. You lasted by questioning everything, especially the things that looked harmless.
What if they were designed to mislead someone?
Frustrated, I stared at my screen, then leaned back in my chair and stared out the window. The AC was working at full blast, trying to keep out the muggy heat of summer. It cooled down at night, but the humidity never really let up.
There was no way in hell I would live somewhere that was so humid on a daily basis.
I longed for the dry, high-altitude heat of Colorado — sunny days that didn’t leave you feeling sticky, when even a scorching day could feel bearable in the shade. Nights cooled off fast, the kind of cool that let you sleep with the windows open and wake up breathing in the fresh mountain air.
