The leather photo album felt colder than I remembered as I turned its pages, each one pulling me further back into a life that no longer belonged to me.
There I was at eighteen—Pomeline Hale—smiling like someone who believed the world would always make sense if you just loved hard enough. Beneath my graduation photo, that old quote still sat in print like a relic of certainty: Love takes two to make it real.
I almost laughed.
Almost.
Because on the next page, he was there.
Dorian Reed.
Not looking at the camera, but slightly away, like he had always existed a little outside of reach. My first love. My unfinished sentence. The boy I had built entire futures around without ever asking if he was building them too.
I had been certain of us in that way only teenagers can be—absolute, fearless, and completely wrong.
And then, just before graduation… he disappeared.
No fight. No explanation. No goodbye.
Just absence.
And I had carried that absence for twenty years like it meant something about me.
That night, the doorbell pulled me out of the past.
Kerensa stood on my porch in sequins and confidence, acting like she hadn’t just walked into the wreckage of my nostalgia. She brushed off my hesitation the way she always did—like fear was just a bad habit I needed to quit.
“You’re not still stuck on that boy, are you?” she teased.
I wanted to say no.
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