Chapter 2

My bedroom felt like a sanctuary, a quiet space where I could finally let the mask drop. The moment I closed the door behind me, the strength I had maintained in the library crumbled. I slid down the door and sat on the floor, my bag dropping with a soft thud beside me.

The silence of the room was deafening, amplifying the turmoil inside my head. I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, trying to hold myself together. The pain of Liam' s words was a physical ache, a heavy weight pressing down on me.

How could he?

How could he say those things so easily?

My mind replayed the scene in the library. The casual way he dismissed our lifelong plan, the condescending tone when he talked about me, the utter certainty that I would just follow him. It was a complete betrayal, a deeper cut than I could have ever imagined.

I thought about all our years together. Building forts in his backyard, promising we' d build rockets together one day. The countless hours we spent studying, him helping me with history, me explaining complex physics problems to him. He was the one who held my hand at my father' s funeral, who sat with me for hours without saying a word because he knew that' s what I needed.

I remembered a rainy afternoon last year, huddled under an awning, waiting for the downpour to stop. He had turned to me, his expression serious for once.

"Ava, we' re really going to do it, right? Caltech. You and me. We' ll have a lab, just like your dad."

His words had been a comfort, a solid promise in a world that often felt uncertain. I had held onto that promise, weaving it into the fabric of my own dream. Now, it felt like a lie. Had all those moments been just as casual to him as his decision to leave it all behind for a girl he barely knew?

Had his promise just been a whim, a convenient thing to say in the moment?

The thought made me feel foolish, humiliated. I had built so much of my future around a shared vision that, for him, was apparently disposable.

I stood up and walked over to my desk. Pinned to the corkboard above it was a faded photograph of my father. He was standing in front of a wind tunnel, a huge, proud smile on his face. He was an aerospace researcher, a brilliant man whose passion for the stars was infectious. He died in a lab accident when I was fourteen, a tragedy that had solidified my own resolve to follow in his footsteps.

My dream to go to Caltech, to study aerospace engineering, wasn' t about Liam. It was about my dad. It was about finishing the work he started, about understanding the universe he loved so much. Liam was supposed to be there with me, my partner in the journey, but he was never the destination.

I had let our closeness blur the lines. I had let him become such a central part of my life that he, and maybe even I, had forgotten that my path was my own.

His casual assumption that I would change my entire life plan for him was the final, brutal clarification I needed. He didn' t respect my dream. He didn' t even see it as mine.

I opened my laptop again, the application portal still open. My cursor hovered over the list of universities. It would be so easy to change it, to find NYU on the list and make it my top choice. A few clicks, and our paths would align again. The thought was tempting, a pull towards the familiar, the comfortable.

But then I saw his face in my mind, heard his voice in the library. She can' t live without me anyway.

A surge of anger, cold and clear, washed away the pain.

No.

I moved the cursor away from the list and straight to the 'Submit' button. My hand was steady as I clicked it. The screen refreshed, showing a confirmation page.

'Congratulations! Your application to the California Institute of Technology has been submitted.'

I closed the laptop with a decisive snap.

It was done.

Maybe some people are destined to walk the same path for their whole lives, but maybe others are just meant to cross paths for a while. Our road had diverged. He had chosen his new direction, and now, I had officially chosen mine.