PROLOGUE: A STUDY IN ABSENCE
They say that love makes a fool out of the wisest people, but nobody warns you about the quiet, slow-burning humiliation of loving someone who simply isn’t looking at you.
It was never a secret. I didn’t know how to keep it one.
For three years, four months, and sixteen days, my devotion to Nate Sterling was a public spectacle, as obvious and undeniable as the changing of the leaves in Washington Square Park. Everyone knew. My roommates knew when I spent hours baking matcha cookies because I heard him mention offhandedly that he missed green tea. The baristas at the campus coffee shop knew because I always ordered two drinks—a iced vanilla oat latte for myself, and a black cold brew with a single pump of hazelnut for the boy who barely had time to say thank you. Even Nate knew.
Especially Nate.
He never lied to me. That was the most devastating part. Nate was never a villain; he was just an engineer. He viewed the world in structural loads, blueprints, and clean, unyielding angles. He couldn’t force a stress point where there was no foundation, and he couldn’t force himself to feel something for a girl who simply took up too much space in his peripheral vision.
“I like you as a person, Jacy,” he had told me once, sitting on the concrete steps outside the Bobst Library while the autumn wind whipped my dark brown hair across my face. His green eyes had been steady, terribly honest, and completely devoid of the warmth I spent nights praying to see. “But I don’t feel that way about you. Please don’t wait for me.”
I had laughed it off, pulling my knit cardigan tighter around my chest, hiding the slight tremble in my hands. “Who said I’m waiting?” I had lied, my voice dripping with forced playfulness. “I just happen to be going the same way.”
I thought persistence was a virtue. I thought love was a stamina test, a long-distance race where the finish line was his heart, and all I had to do was keep running. I believed that if I stayed close enough, cared hard enough, and made myself an indispensable fixture in his life, one day he would wake up, look at me, and realize I had been the right answer all along.
I was wrong.
Loving Nate Sterling didn’t make him fall in love with me. It only taught him how to live with my presence until it became background noise—like the steady thrum of the subway train beneath the city streets. Present, but ignored.
Until the day I finally stopped running.
