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Harlow shook her head. “Actually, no. It’s kind of interesting hearing about it from the other side. Besides,” she grinned. “There’s a reason I have a talk show. I’m nosy,” she whispered, leaning forward and winking at me.

I huffed out a laugh and shook my head.

“There’s not much else to tell, honestly. It sucked. It took a lot of time and a lot of effort to dig myself out of that hole. I had to sit with myself for a while and figure out who the hell I was and what I wanted for myself. That wasn’t just because of my relationship with–him,” I nearly faltered. “I had been putting off thinking about those questions for a long time. Too long. I had to figure out what I wanted my life to look like, independent of him.”

I paused, hand automatically rising to the little gold swallow around my neck as I stared off into the distance. “I had to give myself permission to want a new dream, and more importantly, I had to allow myself to give up on the ones I thought I wanted. Which included him.”

Silence fell across the table. I stared at the plate in the middle, at the melted ice cream. My hand dropped into my lap.

“Wow,” Harlow said eventually. “That was brave.”

I scoffed. “Not really. It fucking sucked.”

We both laughed. I wasn’t the only person at this table who’d had to reinvent herself, and at least I’d been afforded the luxury of anonymity while I’d done it. After a moment, I sobered. “In the end,” I said quietly, “I had to decide to love myself more than I had loved him.”

Harlow’s mouth twisted and she flinched. “Just like that?”

“No. No. Sometimes… fuck.” I swallowed hard before exhaling shakily. “No. Not just like that. It took a long time. I had to keep reminding myself that the world still existed, y’know? I had to keep telling myself that even though I didn’t enjoy something today, I could enjoy it again in the future.”

“Enjoy something?”

I sighed, closing my eyes briefly, feeling the slightest hint of wetness on my lashes. Gone by the time I opened my eyes.

“Yeah. It’s probably dumb, but for a while I just didn’t want anything. I didn’t want to, like, watch movies, or read books, or eat ice cream. Stupid shit that I did anyway, because that’s normal, right?” My voice sounded thin, and I clenched my hands under the table to hide the slight tremble. “One day, I realised I was just going through the motions of a life, and that’s a little pathetic, right?” I looked away, laughing at myself quietly. “I didn’t tell anyone.”

“That’s not pathetic,” Harlow said quietly.

I shrugged. “It felt pathetic at the time.”

I felt emotionally abraded. Raw in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to feel for a long time. My throat hurt when I swallowed, but I forced myself to keep talking, because it felt somehow freeing to say all this out loud when I’d barely allowed myself to even think about how fucking broken I’d been.

“I had to tell myself that one day I’d want to eat ice cream again, one day I’d laugh at the bastard crows in my mum’s garden, and that one day I’d want to watch scary movies again.”

“Did you?” Harlow’s voice wavered, and on her face I saw all the ways her life mirrored mine.

“Eventually,” I smiled, spinning my amethyst ring around my finger.

“Okay,” she said softly. “I think I needed to hear that.”

Chapter 20

Isat on the floor of Becka’s apartment because she’d sold her sofa yesterday. The floor was a lighter shade where it used to be, and I tried not to stare at it.

“I couldn’t take it with me,” she’d sighed wistfully when I’d asked her about it.

It was a silly thing to fixate on, but I couldn’t look at that empty space and not see all the memories I’d made there. The movie binges, the late-night heart-to-hearts, laughing so hard I thought I was going to be sick.

Kissing Jihoon.

But the sofa was just a sofa, and this apartment was just a place. I still had the memories.

Becka was moving back in with her parents until she figured things out. She couldn’t afford her rent anymore, not without a job.

GVibes had no official events planned today, so I was hanging out with Becka. We were working our way down a list of stuff she had to do before moving. She’d lived here for so long, there were a lot of loose ends to tie up.

Around midday, and several phone calls to utilities companies later, I got a message. I stared at it for a moment, willing my brain to catch up with my eyes to make sense of the Hangul.

Ace