Chapter 7
The announcement does not happen quietly, the way personal devastation never does, but explodes across screens and conversations and whispered confirmations like something inevitable finally claiming its space in the world, and I wake to it the way people wake to disasters—half-conscious, disoriented, my phone vibrating relentlessly on the nightstand as if it has something urgent and cruel it needs to tell me before I am ready.
DEVIN CROSS AND AVA MONROE: A UNION OF LEGACY AND FUTURE, the headline reads, accompanied by a photograph so carefully staged it makes my chest ache: Devin in a tailored suit that fits him like obligation, Ava at his side in white, her smile flawless and victorious, her hand resting on his arm as if it has always belonged there.
I stare at the screen until the words blur.
Rome feels like a lifetime ago.
By the time I get to school, everyone knows.
They watch me the way people watch wreckage, not cruelly, not kindly, but with that detached fascination reserved for things that prove their worst assumptions right. I hear my name paired with words like temporary and phase and mistake, and it is almost worse that no one says them to my face, that they let me walk through the day carrying the weight of their conclusions alone.
Devin doesn’t come to school.
Ava does.
She floats through the halls like gravity no longer applies to her, accepting congratulations she didn’t earn, smiling as if she has won something fair, something uncontested, something that didn’t require collateral damage to secure.
She finds me after lunch, as if this story needs one more deliberate wound.
“I wanted you to hear it from me,” she says softly, her voice coated in false compassion. “This was always how it was going to end.”
I meet her gaze, steady despite the way my chest feels like it’s caving in.
“You don’t love him,” I say.
She shrugs. “Love is irrelevant.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I reply. “It’s the only thing that ever mattered.”
She laughs quietly.
“You think that,” she says. “Because you still believe love protects you.”
And then she leaves, her heels echoing like punctuation at the end of a sentence I didn’t consent to being written.
That night, I make a decision.
It’s not dramatic. It’s not brave in the way people like to romanticize sacrifice. It’s quiet and lonely and devastatingly practical, and it hurts so badly I almost change my mind a dozen times before committing to it, because loving Devin has taught me something terrible and essential: sometimes the most loving thing you can do is step out of the way.
I go to his house one last time.
The mansion is brighter than usual, buzzing with preparations, staff moving quickly, voices layered over one another in controlled chaos, and I feel like a ghost slipping through a living body, unseen and unwanted and already half erased.
He finds me in the garden.
He looks wrecked.
Not the polished, composed version the cameras adore, but the boy I know—the one with shadows under his eyes, his shoulders slumped like the weight of expectation has finally bent him in half.
“I didn’t choose this,” he says the moment he sees me, desperation threading every syllable.
“I know,” I whisper.
“I can stop it,” he insists. “I can still—”
“No,” I interrupt gently. “You can’t. Not without destroying everything.”
“I don’t care,” he says. “None of it matters without you.”
“That’s not true,” I say, even though the lie tastes bitter. “It matters because it’s your life.”
I take a step back.
“This doesn’t end with us winning,” I continue. “It ends with you broken and me blamed for it.”
His hands tremble.
“I love you,” he says, like the words are an anchor he’s throwing into deep water.
I swallow hard.
“I love you too,” I reply. “That’s why I’m leaving.”
The silence that follows is unbearable.
“You don’t get to decide that alone,” he says hoarsely.
“I do,” I say. “Because you already signed your future away. And I won’t be the thing they use to punish you.”
He reaches for me, but I step out of range.
“I need you to let me go,” I say. “If any of this meant anything to you at all.”
His breath breaks.
When I walk away, I don’t look back.
If I do, I won’t survive it.
I leave town two weeks later.
College acceptance in hand, a future that feels smaller but safer waiting for me somewhere else, I pack my life into boxes that suddenly feel too light for everything I’m leaving behind, and when Ethan offers to drive me, I say yes, because I need the reminder that there are people who love me without conditions, without contracts, without entire empires attached.
College is different.
No one knows my name. No one knows my history. No one looks at me like I’m a footnote in someone else’s story, and for a while, the anonymity feels like relief, like I can finally breathe again without the world pressing in.
Ethan visits often.
He’s patient. Kind. Steady in a way Devin never had the luxury to be, and slowly, carefully, I let myself lean into the comfort of something uncomplicated, something that doesn’t require sacrifice just to survive.
I almost convince myself it’s enough.
Almost.
Until one crisp autumn afternoon, the sky splitting open with sound, the campus freezing in collective confusion as a helicopter descends toward the center lawn like something out of a fever dream, students scattering, phones lifting, panic and awe colliding in equal measure.
I know before I see him.
I feel it in my bones.
The helicopter lands.
The door opens.
And Devin Cross steps out into my new life, the wind whipping around him, his expression fierce and unapologetic and free in a way I have never seen before.
He looks at me like the world has finally stopped arguing with him.
And in that moment, as everyone watches, I understand the final twist of our story—
He didn’t come back to reclaim me.
He came back because he burned everything else down.
