Prologue
LORENZO ATREUS POV
Some names stay with you. Hers was inked into every quiet part of my memory.
The corner booth of Mack’s Diner had always been our spot. I watched Isla lick ketchup from her thumb, her laugh echoing against the grimy tiles as I compared the sputtering soda machine to a dying spaceship. For a second, it felt like nothing had changed. Like, we were still just two kids skipping class, stealing time before the rest of our lives began.
“Paris in fall,” she said, eyes excited beneath that stupid beanie I always hated. Her eyes were glowing like always when she talked about what was next.
“Milan in winter. Maybe Tokyo by spring.” Her voice gained momentum with each city, each dream growing larger than the cramped booth containing us.
I remember thinking maybe, just maybe, we could do both. She could chase her dreams, and I could still be part of the picture. “We could make it work,” I said carefully. “Long distance isn’t impossible.”
But even then, something in her was already leaving.
She didn’t answer. Not right away, and in that hesitation, something quietly cracked within.
She went quiet on the walk back to her apartment. Not our usual comfortable quiet, but the kind that builds a wall, brick by brick. By the time we reached her front door, Isla stood before me transformed—spine straight, eyes sharpened with resolve, as if she’d stepped onto the runway she so desperately wanted.
“I need to focus, Ace,” she said, her voice carrying a practiced edge I’d never heard before. “This industry… there’s no room for distractions.”
“Distractions?” I repeated the word, settling like ice in my stomach. “Is this what I am now?”
I studied her… the girl who once fell asleep against my shoulder after practicing walking in high heels, feet full of bruises after rehearsal. Who swore she’d never become one of those girls who changed for the industry. Now she stood with newly cropped hair and a steel in her posture that belonged to someone else.
“This isn’t you,” I said quietly. “You’re not just some model. You’re you.”
She didn’t flinch, but I caught the slight tightening of her throat. Without thinking, I reached up, my fingertips brushing the short edges of her hair. It still smelled like her—jasmine and citrus—but it felt like touching a goodbye.
“I can’t have a relationship right now,” she said evenly. “You’ve seen what happens to the girls who try to juggle everything. It doesn’t work.”
We were eighteen. Still half-children with the audacity to believe love could outrun ambition.
“You don’t have to choose,” I insisted, my voice low. “You could have both.”
She shook her head, pearl earrings catching the late afternoon light, “No, I can’t. Not if I want to be more than just a pretty face.”
I moved closer, my hands hovering near her cheek. She pulled back slightly, just enough.
“I want this, Ace,” she whispered. Her thumb rubbing slow circles on my knuckle, like it was meant to soothe the ache beneath our silence.
“And if that means letting go of us… I have to do it.”
I didn’t respond. There was nothing left to say…
I stood motionless, watching the girl I loved choose a different life, one that had no space for me.
When Isla broke up with me to pursue modeling, I didn’t just walk away heartbroken. I channeled that pain into purpose. The anger, the rejection, and the sense of not being enough in her world became the fuel that propelled me forward. I buried myself in textbooks, internships, and mock trials—not just to succeed but to escape—to prove I could become someone powerful enough that no one would ever look at me again.
I constructed my life with precision. Morning runs at 5:00 AM, protein shakes at 5:45, law library by 6:30. Disciplined to a fault. My apartment was meticulously ordered as my arrangements in court. My colleagues mistook it for extraordinary ambition. Professors called it natural talent. But few recognized it for what it truly was. Armor, forged in the fire of being left behind.
“They say he passed the bar before he could legally drink champagne. Some kind of genius,” I once overheard the interns whisper when they thought I couldn’t hear them. The “wunderkind,” the “young hotshot lawyer” whose reputation preceded him in every courtroom. Losing wasn’t an option—Not anymore, not ever again.
For sev years, I navigated my carefully constructed life with mathematical precision. I pretended not to notice her face on every billboard and beauty campaign that lined my route to the courthouse.
Isla Noelle Stoermer.
Everywhere and nowhere at once.
It happened at a party I wasn’t meant to attend, one of those rooftop affairs saturated with champagne. I had no business being there. Just a quick appearance for a client, a handshake, a glass I didn’t want. But then she walked in.
Her eyes swept across the crowd, passing over me without a flicker of recognition. Not even a flicker of recognition disturbed the perfection of her face. The industry had consumed her whole, leaving nothing but a carefully crafted image where the girl with ketchup on her thumb once existed.
I saw Victor’s arm snake around her waist.
She’s truly gone.
Sometimes I wonder if she’s truly gone… if success erased every trace of the girl from the diner booth. Or if somewhere, behind those camera-ready eyes and rehearsed smiles, a fragment of that girl remains, buried beneath layers of the person she became to survive.
I might tell myself I’m over her, but her name still lives somewhere behind the armor I have built.
Even if she’s no longer the girl I knew, or if she’s forgotten how we once were.
