I shut down.
There's no other word for what happens after I leave Zachary's apartment. I return to campus and burrow into my dorm room like I'm waiting out a storm only I can see, curtains drawn against sunlight that feels too aggressive, blankets pulled up to my chin despite the warmth of late spring.
Gemma asks questions I deflect with monosyllables.
"How was your weekend?"
"Fine."
"Did something happen?"
"No."
"You've been in bed for two days."
"Tired."
She stops asking after that, but I feel her watching me with the particular concern of someone cataloging symptoms they don't know how to treat. I should appreciate the space she's giving me. Instead, I resent her for not pushing harder, for letting me marinate in misery instead of forcing me to articulate what I destroyed and why.
Classes I used to care about become obligations I skip without guilt. Professor Chen's research seminar meets on Tuesday, and I text a lie about a stomach bug rather than explain why I can't sit in a room full of people acting like the world hasn't fundamentally rearranged itself.
The economics midterm happens without me. The study group texts pile up unread, their notifications eventually silenced because even the buzz of my phone feels like too much contact with a reality I can't face.
The world continues outside my window, indifferent to my collapse. Students cross the quad laughing at jokes I can't hear. The dining hall serves meals I don't eat. The sun rises and sets with the particular cruelty of a universe that keeps spinning regardless of whether you want it to stop.
I exist in a suspended state—not processing, not healing, just surviving the particular paralysis of having destroyed something I wanted because wanting it terrified me.
Days blur together. Three becomes four becomes a week of lying in twisted sheets that smell like my own unwashed desperation. I shower when Gemma makes pointed comments about the room's atmosphere.
I eat when she physically places food in front of me and refuses to leave until I've choked down at least half. I function at the bare minimum required to avoid intervention, and I tell myself this is temporary, that eventually the numbness will recede and something like normal will return.
The lie tastes thinner each time I repeat it.
Then Gemma shoves a phone in my face with an expression that carries warning.
"You need to see this." Her voice is careful, the particular gentleness reserved for delivering news you know will cause damage. "I'm sorry, but you need to see it before someone else mentions it."
The screen shows Instagram, and for a disoriented moment I don't understand what I'm looking at. Marvin, golden and smiling, at some outdoor restaurant I don't recognize. His arm wrapped around a woman whose face I vaguely recall from economics lectures—Sophia Chen, the redhead who used to watch him across the classroom with poorly disguised longing.
The caption reads: official!
The heart emoji feels like a knife sliding between my ribs.
"When was this posted?" My voice sounds strange, disconnected from my body.
"Last night. But Violet—" Gemma hesitates, clearly debating how much to share. "There are more. From the past week. They've been... public."
I take the phone from her hands and start scrolling, watching the photos multiply with each swipe. Marvin and Sophia at a dinner party, her head on his shoulder. Marvin and Sophia at someone's birthday celebration, dancing close enough that light couldn't pass between them. Marvin and Sophia at what looks like a lacrosse event, her wearing his jersey number painted on her cheek.
The kind of public visibility Marvin always wanted and I always refused.
"I don't understand." I do the math out loud, needing to hear the impossibility of it spoken into the room. "I saw him—it couldn't have been more than two weeks ago. In a café. With Zachary. He must have seen us, because these posts started days after that."
"Maybe he was already seeing her?" Gemma offers the possibility like she's not sure she should.
"Then why was he still texting me three weeks ago asking to talk?" I scroll back further, searching for the beginning of this timeline. "Either he was pursuing her while claiming he wanted me back, or he pivoted to someone new within days of seeing me with Zachary."
"Which would be worse?"
"Neither." I stare at a photo of Sophia leaning into Marvin's chest, her face tilted up toward his with the particular adoration of someone who can't believe their luck. "Neither option hurts less than the other."
The first possibility means he was never sincere—that the wounded boy who accused me of having someone else was already cultivating a replacement. The second means everything we shared was disposable enough that he could simply redirect his affection toward the nearest available target, like love is just a faucet you can point in any direction.
I keep scrolling until my eyes burn, cataloging details that shouldn't matter but somehow do. The way Sophia leans into him without hesitation, without the careful negotiation of boundaries I always demanded. The way Marvin holds her like someone he's proud to claim—arm possessive around her shoulders, hand splayed on her lower back in photos where anyone could see.
The contrast with how he held me makes my chest tight with something that isn't quite jealousy.
"You okay?" Gemma's voice pulls me back, and I realize I've been staring at the same photo for minutes.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You just found out your ex moved on at warp speed with someone who's doing everything you wouldn't."
The accuracy of her observation lands somewhere vulnerable, and I feel tears threatening for the first time since I walked out of Zachary's apartment.
"I wouldn't let him hold me in public," I say, and the words carry the weight of confession. "I wouldn't go to his events. Wouldn't meet his friends. Wouldn't let him post photos or call me his girlfriend or any of the things he wanted. And now she's doing all of it, and he's smiling in a way he never smiled with me."
"Violet—"
"It's not jealousy." I hand her phone back because I can't look at it anymore. "It's worse than jealousy. It's watching someone give someone else exactly what you wouldn't let them give you, and realizing the problem was never them. The problem was always you."
Gemma doesn't argue. Just sits beside me on the bed and lets me lean against her shoulder while something cracks open in my chest that I've been holding shut for days.
I think about Zachary, alone in his apartment after I called what we did a mistake.
I think about Marvin, publicly adoring someone who lets herself be adored back.
I think about myself, sitting in a dorm room I've barely left in a week, surrounded by evidence that I've spent my entire life pushing away people who wanted to love me and then wondering why I ended up alone.
The tears come without permission, and I let them fall because fighting them requires energy I no longer have.
Gemma holds me while I cry, and she doesn't say it will be okay, doesn't promise things she can't guarantee.
She just stays, which is more than I've let anyone do in longer than I can remember.