The Day I Stopped Loving Him

My left heel snapped somewhere between the east courtyard and the elm-lined path that cut through the back of campus.

I didn't stop walking.

I just shifted my weight and kept going, one shoe whole and one shoe broken, my gait lurching and uneven in the dark. The rain had thinned to a cold mist now, the kind that doesn't fall so much as hang in the air, settling into your hair and your eyelashes and the back of your neck. My dress had stopped being a dress somewhere around the fountain. It was just weight now. Wet fabric and ruined thread and thirty-one nights I was never getting back.

The ankle started bleeding a few minutes later. The broken heel had left a jagged edge that caught the skin with every step — a small, precise pain that I almost welcomed. It gave me something concrete to focus on instead of the loop still running in my head.

*She's like a golden retriever.*

I focused on the blood.

The path was empty this time of night. Everyone who wasn't at the Masquerade was inside somewhere warm, and the lamplight here was sparse, just pale pools of yellow every thirty feet or so with long stretches of dark in between. I moved through the dark parts and avoided the light. I didn't want to be seen. I didn't want to have to arrange my face into something that looked like I was fine.

I was not fine.

But I was also, strangely, not falling apart. That was the thing I couldn't quite make sense of. There was no sobbing. No shaking. Just this hollow, ringing quiet inside my chest, like the aftermath of a bell that had already struck and faded.

Headlights swept around the bend behind me.

I moved to the edge of the path without thinking, giving the car room to pass. But the engine slowed instead of speeding up, and then there was the sharp sound of tires on wet pavement, a car pulling to a hard stop just a few feet ahead of me.

Black. Low. The kind of car that didn't belong on a campus path — an Aston Martin, dark as a bruise, idling with quiet, expensive authority.

The driver's door opened.

I stopped walking.

Rowan Vance stepped out.

I knew who he was the way everyone at Harwick knew who he was — by reputation first, then by sight. Architecture's resident genius and permanent enigma. Third year, never seen at parties, never seen doing much of anything social at all. He had a habit of disappearing for weeks at a time and then reappearing in the studio at three in the morning, apparently having built something extraordinary in the interim. Professors talked about him in the particular hushed tones people reserve for things they don't fully understand.

He was also Julian's half-brother. The one Julian never mentioned without that tight, controlled look crossing his face — the look that meant envy dressed up as contempt.

Rowan stood beside the car and looked at me.

He didn't say anything at first. He just took in the full picture — the wrecked dress, the broken shoe, the mascara, the bleeding ankle, all of it — with an expression that wasn't pity and wasn't amusement. It was something more unsettling than either. It was the look of someone doing a very calm, very thorough assessment.

I lifted my chin.

"I'm fine," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected.

He didn't respond to that. Instead, he reached back into the car, and for a moment I thought he was going to get back in and drive away. But what he pulled out was a jacket. Black leather, worn soft at the elbows, the kind of jacket that had been broken in over years rather than purchased that way.

He walked toward me.

I held my ground, which was harder than it sounds when you're standing in wet grass with one broken heel and your whole body is shaking from cold you've been pretending not to feel for the past hour.

He didn't ask. He just settled the jacket over my shoulders the way you'd drape something over a piece of furniture — decisive, efficient, no ceremony. The leather was warm from the car's heat, and it smelled like tobacco and something cool and clean underneath, like cold mint, like winter air on a clear night. It hit me all at once, that warmth, and my body responded before my pride could stop it. My shoulders dropped half an inch. I pulled in a breath.

Rowan stepped back and looked at me again. His jaw was sharp in the lamplight, his expression still unreadable.

"You're bleeding," he said. His voice was low and a little rough, like it didn't get used for small talk often enough to stay smooth.

"I noticed."

A beat of silence.

"The Masquerade," he said. Not a question.

I didn't answer.

He looked at the dress — really looked at it, the way someone who understands construction looks at something that's been destroyed. The ruined hem. The bled-out dye. The silver stitching gone dark and heavy with water.

"You made that yourself."

Also not a question.

Something about that — the fact that he could tell, the fact that he'd noticed — put a crack in the hollow quiet I'd been carrying. I pressed my lips together and looked away, down the path toward the dark stretch ahead.

"Was it worth it?" he asked.

The question landed differently than I expected. Not cruel. Just direct, the way a scalpel is direct — not unkind by nature, just precise.

"Was any of it worth it." He paused. "Getting that wrecked over someone who can't even be bothered to show up."

I turned back to look at him.

His eyes were dark, steady. He wasn't performing concern. He wasn't trying to make me feel better. He was just asking, the way you ask someone a question you actually want the answer to.

"He's your brother," I said.

"Half," Rowan said, flat. "And that's not an answer."

It wasn't.

I looked down at the jacket I was clutching with both hands, my fingers wrapped around the front edges, knuckles pale. The warmth had spread all the way through me now, or maybe that was just the tears finally arriving — I could feel them building, that specific pressure behind my eyes that meant they were done waiting.

*A golden retriever. She comes bounding back, tail wagging.*

Thirty-one nights.

Two bled fingers.

Every midnight text I'd answered in under a minute.

Every time I'd rearranged my own life to fit into the shape of his.

The tears came.

Not the ugly, heaving kind. Just a quiet overflow, one after another, tracking down my already-ruined face. I didn't try to stop them. I was too tired to try to stop them.

But even as they fell, something else was happening underneath. Something was coming into focus — sharp and clear and cold as the mist still hanging in the air around us. The same way a room looks different once you turn the lights on. The same way you can finally see the shape of something once you stop trying to make it into what you wished it was.

I tightened my hands around the jacket's edges.

"No," I said. My voice was wet but it was steady. "It wasn't worth it."

I looked up at him.

"This is the last time."