My Best Friend Stole My First Love

Ethan’s POV

My first love.

I met her on Bloomers.

She was one of the happiest, most carefree people I’ve ever known.

From the very first conversation, something just clicked between us. It didn’t feel forced or planned. It felt natural… like we were already meant to find each other.

She made me laugh easily. Even the smallest things she said had a way of softening my thoughts, like the world became lighter whenever she was around.

With her, I didn’t have to pretend to be anyone else.

I’ve never seen her face.

But I always imagined her as beautiful—not just in appearance, but in the way she talked, the way she thought, the way she existed.

Her voice over the phone… soft, a little shy when she said my name… stayed with me longer than I expected.

Everything about her felt real.

Like something I didn’t want to lose.

My eyes opened slowly. Everything was blurry.

My head felt heavy. My body didn’t feel like mine.

The room was quiet for a moment, with only the soft beeping of machines filling the space around me. I shifted slightly, and my body still felt heavy and unfamiliar beneath me, as though it belonged to someone else.

The door opened, and a doctor stepped in, my dad following close behind him.

“Ethan,” my dad said quickly, almost rushing to my side. “You’re awake.” His voice cracked slightly at the end, carrying a strange mixture of relief, shock, and exhaustion all at once. For a second, he just stood there, like he wasn’t sure if he should touch me or not.

“Yeah…” I muttered, blinking slowly as I tried to adjust to everything around me. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

The doctor gave a small, professional nod before stepping closer to the bed. “Ethan, I’m going to ask you a few questions. Nothing difficult, alright?”

I looked at him for a moment, then glanced over at my dad, and something about the way they were both watching me so closely made my chest tighten slightly.

“…Okay,” I said.

“Do you know your full name?”

I frowned a little, though that question was easy enough to answer. “Ethan Brooks.”

“Good,” the doctor said calmly. “And do you know where you are right now?”

I looked around the room again, taking in the white walls, the quiet machines, the soft overhead lights, and everything about it felt far too clean, far too unfamiliar to be comforting.

“Hospital,” I answered.

“Correct,” he replied.

He paused for a moment before my brows pulled together on their own. “Can someone just… tell me what actually happened to me?”

A brief silence followed, and I noticed it first in my dad, the way he looked down at the floor before anyone else even spoke, and that alone was enough to make my stomach tighten with dread.

The doctor spoke gently. “You were involved in a road accident.”

My chest shifted uncomfortably at the words. “A road accident?” I repeated, slower this time, as though saying it again might make it easier to understand.

My dad stepped closer to the bed now, his voice softer than before. “You were hit while crossing the road after school.”

I blinked, turning the words over in my mind. After school. It sounded like such an ordinary thing to be doing, almost too ordinary, like there was something buried underneath it that I still couldn’t quite reach.

But something about it didn’t sit right in my head, no matter how many times I turned the words over.

“Why was I not paying attention?” I asked quietly.

My head throbbed a little as I tried to force the memory to the surface, and there was something there, just out of reach, but it kept slipping away every time I got close.

“I wasn’t just walking,” I added. “I feel like I was doing something… important.”

My dad hesitated, and I noticed it immediately before he finally sighed.

“You were on your phone, Ethan.”

I stared at the ceiling for a second, turning the thought over in my mind and wondering what exactly I could have been doing on it. I tried to pull the memory closer, but all I managed to grasp were fragments, a sound, a vibration, maybe a message, and then nothing at all, just an emptiness sitting where something important should have been.

My jaw tightened slightly. “I can’t remember it clearly,” I admitted.

The doctor nodded, not looking the least bit surprised. “That’s completely normal. After a head injury like yours, it’s common to have gaps in memory, especially around the event itself. It’s called retrograde amnesia,” he added.

I swallowed. “So… how bad was it?” I asked.

The room went quiet again, and this time even the doctor hesitated for a fraction of a second before he spoke. “You’ve been unconscious for four months.”

That number didn’t settle easily in my head. Four months. It felt far too big, far too unreal to actually belong to me. I blinked slowly.

“…Four months,” I repeated, almost like I was testing whether it was real by saying it out loud.

My dad nodded, his voice lower now than before. “We weren’t sure you were going to wake up, Ethan.”

That hit differently than everything else had, not dramatic exactly, just heavy, like something sinking slowly into my chest and settling there. I looked away for a moment, trying to process it, trying to feel like myself again, but everything still felt disconnected, like I was watching my own life from somewhere just outside of it.

The doctor checked the monitor beside me again. “Your recovery is progressing well. But you need to take things slowly. Don’t force your memory, it will come back in pieces.”

I nodded slightly, though I wasn’t really focused on his words anymore.

My thoughts kept drifting, like something important was sitting just out of reach, waiting for me to notice it.

“Where’s my phone?” I asked suddenly.

My dad sighed, rubbing his forehead slightly before he answered. “It was badly damaged in the accident.”

“I need it,” I said immediately.

The doctor glanced at my dad but didn’t interrupt. My dad stepped closer to the bed. “Ethan, it’s not usable right now. We tried to recover it, but it’s gone.”

I frowned, already thinking that I would need a new one soon. There was a small pause, and my dad looked at me for a moment like he wanted to say something else before he finally nodded slowly.

“…Alright. Once you’re discharged, I’ll get you a new one.”

I exhaled slowly and nodded once, even though I didn’t fully understand why it mattered so much to me. But it did.

Three days later, I got cleared and discharged, and it turned out to be a long, quiet drive home. The house looked different from how I remembered it, felt emptier somehow, with boxes piled up everywhere I looked.

“Dad, what’s going on? Why are there boxes everywhere?” I asked.

Before he could answer, his phone rang, and he glanced at it before excusing himself to take the call. I turned to my nanny instead. “What’s happening?”

“We’re packing,” she said. “We’re moving to another town.”

I frowned, about to ask why, but my dad walked back in just then, ending his call. “I was transferred,” he said. “I’m going to be the sheriff in another town. I’ve already arranged everything for your school. It’ll be good for you too, a change of environment after the accident.”

I hesitated for a moment before asking, “Okay… so where are we going?”

“Oakwood,” he replied. “And the name of the school you’ll be attending is Eastview High School,” he added.

The name sounded familiar somehow, though I couldn’t quite place why.

“Dad, what about the phone?” I asked anxiously.

“Go to your room. It’s on your desk,” he replied.

I hurried upstairs to my room, and the moment I stepped inside, I spotted the box sitting neatly on my desk waiting for me. I walked over, opened it, and picked up the phone, already beginning to set it up when my nanny, Miss Ann, slipped quietly into the room.

“Did you ever hear back from her?”

she whispered.

I frowned. “Hear from who?”

“The girl,” she said. “The one you told me you liked on Bloomers.”

“Bloomers?” I asked, looking utterly confused.

“Oh… sorry,” she said softly. “I forgot what the doctor said about your memory.” She hesitated for a moment before adding, “You told me you liked a girl on Bloomers.”

I tried to remember, I really did, but the harder I pushed, the more my head began to ache, until I finally forced myself to stop. Miss Ann glanced at me for a moment, then quietly turned to leave the room, but before she reached the door, she hesitated once more and said softly, “Her name is Quiet Lily.”

The name lingered in the air long after she left. Quiet Lily. It sounded important, somehow, though my mind remained completely blank. I exhaled slowly and turned back to the phone, deciding instead to install the Bloomers app.

Moments later, I opened it, and just like that, almost instinctively, my fingers moved across the screen and typed in my password without a moment’s hesitation, as though my body remembered something my mind couldn’t quite reach anymore. Before I could even question what I was doing, I was already in, logged into an account I didn’t remember ever creating in the first place.

My eyes scanned the screen, searching for the messages, or at least for where they should have been, but there was nothing there. No chats, no history, nothing at all. I frowned, my chest tightening as the empty screen refused to make any sense to me.

Then I noticed it, a small line sitting quietly at the top of the screen: Messages older than one month are automatically cleared.

My grip on the phone tightened at once. I had been gone for four months, far longer than the single month the app allowed, which meant everything was already gone. Every conversation, every trace of her, every piece of Quiet Lily that had ever existed between us had already been erased completely.

And somehow, that felt worse than not remembering at all.

I sat there for a moment longer, unable to shake the feeling that something important had been waiting for me there, something I couldn’t fully explain even to myself. I simply felt it, the way you feel the shape of a room in the dark, without being able to see any of it clearly.