Chapter 1
CHASE
I rehearse an apology I haven't earned yet. That's what this is, if I'm honest. Not a proposal. An apology for four years of lying to the only person who ever made me want to stop. Four years of pretending to be someone smaller, someone simpler, someone who wouldn't terrify her with the weight of what I actually am.
The ring sits in my pocket, weighing nothing and everything simultaneously. Point three carats. I know the exact number because I watched the guy behind the counter type it into the register like it meant nothing, like it wasn't every double shift I picked up senior year, every kid I tutored in AP Calc for forty bucks an hour, every night I told Vivian I couldn't come out because I was "working" and let her assume it was somewhere glamorous instead of a diner two towns over where nobody would recognize the Sterling jaw. Where nobody would ask questions I couldn't answer.
Four years of being nobody on purpose. Four years of freedom. And tomorrow she flies to Los Angeles for the job that's been waiting for her since March, the one she hasn't technically accepted yet because some small, stubborn part of her has been waiting to see what I'd do. I know this because she told me, half-joking, that she needed a reason to stay. If I don't give her one today, there won't be another today. There will only be an apartment in Silver Lake and three thousand miles and the particular silence of a phone that rings less and less.
"You're doing the thing." Sienna stands beside me, arms crossed over her graduation gown, sunglasses pushed up into her hair even though the sun hasn't risen yet. The campus is still gray, caught between night and morning. "The thing where your leg won't stop."
I glance down. My knee bounces like it's trying to escape my body, a frantic rhythm I didn't even notice starting.
"I don't have a thing."
"You have several things. This is just the loudest one."
She softens, which for Sienna is rare enough that I actually look at her. Really look. She's worried. I can see it in the way she's holding herself, like she's bracing for impact.
"You're really doing this. Today. In front of two thousand people."
"I'm doing it before the ceremony. Just us. The fountain."
I say it like I've rehearsed it to myself a hundred times, because I have. Every word mapped out, every possible response catalogued and prepared for.
"Nobody else is even out here yet."
Sienna glances toward the quad, toward the folding chairs still stacked in their carts, toward the empty stage where in two hours Vivian will give the valedictorian speech she's rewritten four times. The latest draft, she told me last night, ends with a line about new beginnings and the courage to leave everything familiar behind. She meant it about Los Angeles. I keep hearing it as a goodbye. The version of her that doesn't know what my last name is worth. The version that sees me, just me, without the zeros attached.
"She's going to say yes." Sienna says it like a statement, not a question, as though she's trying to talk herself into believing something for my sake, willing it into existence through sheer force of loyalty.
"I know she is."
I don't know that. I have never been less sure of anything in my entire life. My stomach churns with it, this uncertainty that feels foreign and terrifying.
"I have to go. She said six thirty."
"Chase."
I turn back.
"After this, whatever happens. You know you have to tell her the rest. The money. Your dad. All of it." Sienna chooses each word like she's defusing a bomb.
"I know."
"Today?"
"Today."
My voice does something I don't like, something unsteady and raw, and I clear my throat like that fixes it. Like I can swallow down the fear that's been building for weeks.
"One thing at a time."
I leave her standing by the folding chairs and walk toward the fountain with my hand curled around a ring box like it's the only warm thing I own. For four years, that's exactly what it's been. Not the money sitting in trust funds I've never touched. Not the company waiting for me the second I sign the papers my father's lawyers keep sending, each one more insistent than the last. This. A girl who looked at broke, tired, second-job Chase and decided he was worth her time anyway. Worth her brilliance. Worth her future. A future I'm about to ask her to rewrite one more time, hours before she steps onto that stage and tells two thousand people she's brave enough to leave everything behind.
She's already there when I round the hedge. Cap in her hand instead of on her head, gown unzipped at the collar because she runs hot when she's nervous, and she doesn't know it yet but she has every reason in the world to be nervous today. Every reason to run.
She smiles when she sees me, and something in my chest does the thing it always does around her, the thing that used to scare me before it started feeling like the only true thing in my life. Like coming home to a place I didn't know I'd been searching for.
"You're early."
"I wanted a minute before everyone else gets here."
I close the distance between us. The fountain behind her catches the early light and throws it up onto her face, illuminating the slight furrow between her brows that means she's already thinking three steps ahead. I think, not for the first time, that I have never once been able to describe her accurately to anyone, because every word makes her sound smaller than she is. Less fierce. Less extraordinary.
"A minute for what?"
I don't answer with words. I get down on one knee on the wet concrete edge of the fountain, and I hear her breath catch before I even get the box open. For one full second, before anything goes wrong, I let myself believe this is the best moment of my life. I let myself believe in the fairy tale.
"Vivian Ashford."
My voice doesn't shake. I'm surprised by that, by the steadiness I don't feel anywhere else in my body.
"I know we're twenty-two and broke and this is insane timing. But I've spent four years choosing you, every single day, with nothing to offer but that choice. I don't want to spend one more day not asking you to choose me back. Not as some idea of who I might be. Just this. Just us. Before you get on that plane and this becomes the conversation we never had."
I open the box.
The ring catches the light. Smaller than what her friends' boyfriends can afford. Smaller than anything a Sterling should be putting on anyone's finger. I bought it with my own hands, my own hours, my own name that isn't the name she thinks it is yet. In this one second before she says anything, it is the truest gift I have ever given anyone. The most honest thing I've done in four years.
"Marry me."
Her lips part, and her hand lifts toward mine, fingers already curving like she means to take the ring, like the word yes is already forming somewhere behind her teeth. For half a second, I let myself believe - Then her hand freezes in the air. Something shifts behind her eyes, closes off, and what replaces the hope on her face looks terrifyingly like panic.
