Zachary’s POV
I find out about the formal through Instagram, which feels like a particularly cruel joke considering I don't follow Violet, don't monitor her social presence, have deliberately avoided the digital architecture of her campus life like it's radioactive.
But algorithms don't care about intentions. A mutual connection—someone from Ward Enterprises who friended half the state university Greek system for reasons I've never understood—posts a photo, and the platform delivers it to my feed like a wound I didn't ask for.
Violet in a navy dress that makes my chest tight, the fabric skimming curves I remember with devastating clarity. The golden man beside her with possession written in his posture, his hand splayed across her lower back like he's marking territory. Both of them, smiling at the camera with the practiced ease of people who know they look good together.
The caption reads: campus royalty confirmed
I should scroll past. Close the app. Do literally anything except sit here cataloging details that tell a story I don't want to read.
Instead, I stare at the image longer than I should, zooming in on things that only make the devastation worse. Her smile looks practiced—I know her real smile, the one that crinkles the corners of her eyes, and this isn't it—but her body language is relaxed in ways that practice can't manufacture. She's leaning into him with the ease of someone who's learned to fit there, her shoulder tucked against his chest like they've done this a hundred times.
They look good together.
The observation arrives with clinical detachment that doesn't match what's happening underneath it, like my brain is writing a report while my chest cavity fills with something that might be grief if I let myself name it.
My phone rings. Adison's name on the screen, and I consider ignoring it before remembering that she'll just keep calling until I answer. She's persistent that way.
"Hey." My voice comes out steadier than I expected.
"You sound terrible." No preamble, no pleasantries—Adison has never believed in conversational warm-ups. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Zachary." Her tone carries the particular warning of someone who's known me too long to accept deflection. "I can hear it in your voice. Something's wrong."
I close Instagram and set my phone on speaker, dropping it onto the coffee table so I don't have to hold it against my ear. "I saw photos from some formal at her campus. She was there with him. They looked—" I stop, searching for a word that doesn't taste like surrender. "They looked like a couple."
The silence on her end stretches just long enough to confirm she understands what I'm not saying.
"Where are you right now?"
"Manhattan. My apartment." I lean back against the couch and stare at the ceiling I've memorized over the past week of avoiding the campus apartment entirely. "I haven't been back there since the bookstore."
"Good." Her voice softens slightly. "That's probably healthy."
"Is it?" The laugh that escapes sounds bitter even to me. "Because it doesn't feel healthy. It feels like running away."
"Sometimes running away and self-preservation look exactly the same from the outside. The difference is what you're running toward." She pauses, and I hear Elijah babbling in the background, the mundane sounds of a life that's moving forward while mine seems stuck in amber. "What are you running toward, Zachary?"
I don't have an answer for that.
"She's not waiting for me," I say instead, because the truth feels like something I need to say out loud before it calcifies into something I can keep denying. "She's not preserving space for something I might eventually earn. She's building a life that includes someone else in ways that look increasingly permanent."
"You don't know that for certain."
"I know what I saw." The image surfaces again despite my efforts to suppress it—Violet leaning into Marvin's chest, her body language carrying the particular relaxation of someone who's stopped fighting the current. "And what I saw was a woman who's made her choice."
Adison is quiet for a moment. "What does that mean for you?"
"It means the peripheral existence I accepted was always a delusion dressed as patience." I push myself off the couch and move to the window, needing the physical motion to match the restlessness building in my chest. Manhattan spreads below me, indifferent and glittering, full of people who probably know how to want things without destroying themselves in the process. "I told myself that being nearby would matter. That proximity would become an opportunity. But I was just haunting her life instead of building my own."
"So stop haunting."
"It's not that simple."
"Isn't it?" Her voice carries a challenge now, the particular sharpness she uses in negotiations when she's trying to cut through someone's defenses. "You rented an apartment you're not using. You've been existing in orbit around a woman who asked you for space. At what point does patience become self-destruction?"
The question lands harder than she probably intended.
"I don't belong in her orbit," I admit, and the words feel like something breaking loose inside my chest. "Maybe I never did. Maybe I was always just a chapter she needed to close before she could start the real story."
"That's not fair to either of you."
"Fair has nothing to do with it." I press my palm against the cold glass of the window and let the chill anchor me to something physical. "The question isn't whether to leave anymore. That's already decided. The question is whether I can survive staying gone once I do."
Adison doesn't offer reassurance, doesn't tell me it will get easier or that time heals or any of the platitudes people deploy when they don't know what else to say. She just breathes on the other end of the line, present without pushing, and somehow that's exactly what I need.
"Come into the office tomorrow," she finally says. "We have the Henderson expansion to finalize, and I need my right hand functioning at full capacity."
"Is that your way of telling me to stop wallowing?"
"It's my way of telling you that work has always been your anchor, and maybe you should use it." A pause. "Also yes. Stop wallowing. It doesn't suit you."
I almost smile. "Noted."
"Get some sleep, Zachary. Tomorrow we pretend everything is fine until it actually is."
She hangs up before I can respond, and the apartment settles back into silence around me.
I don't look at Instagram again. Don't pull up the photo that's probably still burning a hole in my memory, waiting to resurface the moment I let my guard down.
Instead, I pour whiskey I don't really want and drink it standing at the window, watching Manhattan pulse with the lives of people who've figured out how to let go of things they can't have.
Tomorrow I'll pretend everything is fine.
Tonight, I let myself feel exactly how much losing her has cost me—even though I never really had her to begin with.