A full-body jolt shot through me—memory, anger, dread, all firing at once. “Trent?—?”
“You were talking to him,” she said, voice tight enough to vibrate. “By the gym doors the last week of school. I walked up behind you, and before I could say anything—” She swallowed hard. “You said I was nobody to you.”
My heart stopped dead.
She kept going, like she had to get it out or choke on it. “That was all I heard.” Her voice cracked. “I thought we were… something. Or on our way to something. And then you told him I was nobody.”
The floor under me shifted, as if an earthquake rocked the community center. It was sure as hell rocking my reality.
“Jess.” But her name came out hoarse, useless. “God—Jess.”
“I know it was ten years ago,” she said quickly, hugging her arms tighter around herself, “but it didn’t feel like that when I heard it. It felt like… I’d made the whole thing up. Every look. Every moment. All of it.”
A flicker of pain twisted her mouth. “And it was humiliating. I felt stupid. Small. So I just… walked away and refused to ever give you the chance to confirm it.”
The full horror of it landed in my chest like a sledgehammer.
Because I remembered Trent. I remembered how he’d been looking at her. I remembered the exact oily smile he’d had when he said her name. And I remembered my own voice throwing up a shield I never once imagined could hit her instead.
“Jess,” I whispered, “I didn’t know you were there. I didn’t know you heard me.”
Her laugh was bitter and small. “Yeah, well. I did.”
I stepped closer without meaning to. “You didn’t hear the first part.”
She blinked. “What first part?”
“The part where I told him to leave you alone.” My voice came out scraped raw. “The part where I was trying to get him to back off without giving him a reason to escalate.”
Her breath punched out of her. Confusion. Hurt. Something cracking open.
I kept going because she needed the whole truth, or none of it mattered.
“I said it because he was dangerous,” I said, my voice low and steady now, because this part needed to be true in every syllable. “If he thought I cared—if he thought I liked you—it would’ve made you a target. He was looking for pressure points. Leverage. Ways to screw with people.”
The tiniest tremor vibrated her mouth. “And you thought pretending not to care would… protect me?”
“It was the only thing I could think of.” The memory hit me in unearthed fragments: his smirk, his too-interested eyes tracking her down the hallway, my pulse hammering in my ears. “I didn’t want him to know I’d been—hell, half the year I barely managedto look at you without forgetting how to breathe. If he’d caught a whiff of that…” I shook my head. “I didn’t trust him with it.”
Silence stretched out long enough that my heartbeat started doing erratic things in the hollow beneath my ribs. She didn’t move. She didn’t yell. But she also didn’t relax and open the way I needed her to.
“Jess,” I said softly, “if I had known you heard me—if I had known that’s what you took away from it—I would’ve run after you. I would’ve explained. I would’ve done literally anything to make sure you never felt like you were nothing to me.”
She let out a shaky exhale that made something twist painfully inside me. “I didn’t want to ask,” she admitted. “I was embarrassed. I thought you’d just confirm it. And it was easier to be angry than look pathetic.”
“You were never pathetic.” I said it with conviction because there was no universe where that word and Jess Donnegan belonged anywhere near each other. “You were… you.” I scrubbed a hand through my hair. “Smart and driven and intimidating as hell in the best way. I didn’t think I had a chance. Not really.”
Her breath hitched. “You did.”
Regret is a strange thing—sharp and dull at once. It hit me in a wave. Ten years of missed chances landed in my chest with the weight of everything we could’ve been.
“I’m sorry. For the line. For being a coward. For not giving you the truth when you deserved it.”
Her eyes softened—barely, but enough that I saw the crack forming in that wall she carried like armor. “I’m sorry too,” she whispered. “For not asking. For holding onto it like gospel.”
We stood like that for a moment—two people in a too-bright room with too many ghosts hovering between us, and something new trying to breathe in the space that remained.
Then she stepped closer. Not much. But enough.
