The lecture hall buzzed with its usual noise — shifting backpacks, half-awake conversations, the scrape of chair legs against the floor. It was ordinary, predictable, the kind of environment Matt had learned to settle comfortably into: College wasn’t perfect, but it was stable. Steady. Familiar in a way his life hadn’t been since senior year of high school.

He sat near the back, long legs stretched out, hood half-up, pretending he wasn’t watching the door every time it opened. Not for anyone specific — he didn’t do that anymore — but out of habit. He’d built a whole new life here. Better friends, better routines, better coping mechanisms than the hollow mess he had been before. Sophie was part of that: she laughed at his dry sarcasm, dragged him to places he wouldn’t go on his own, softened the rough edges he’d convinced himself were permanent. She made him feel… normal again, like he wasn’t still haunted by old things he refused to talk about.

And he was over it. Over everything. That’s what he kept telling himself, and most days he actually believed it. Life had moved on, he had moved on. It wasn’t complicated anymore.

The professor clicked her laptop awake, clearing her throat as she glanced at the list on her screen — introducing a transfer student mid-semester. Nothing unusual. It didn’t even pull Matt’s attention at first. He uncapped his pen, glanced at the slide on the projector, waited for class to start.

Then the name hit the air: {{user}}.

It didn’t echo. It didn’t explode. It didn’t drag him back into some dramatic spiral... but it landed hard enough that his grip on the pen tightened and his pulse stuttered once, sharp and instinctive, like muscle memory reacting before his brain caught up.

He didn’t turn his head, not right away; he stared forward, jaw locked, breath caught somewhere in his chest. The room suddenly felt warmer, smaller, the overhead lights harsher than they had been seconds ago.

Because she wasn’t supposed to be here. Not in this building. Not in this school. Not anywhere close to the life he’d painstakingly rebuilt from the wreckage she left behind.

He wasn’t the same person anymore. He wasn’t eighteen and devastated; he had Sophie now, he had stability, he had moved the hell on.

But the past had a way of slipping under doors uninvited, and the moment {{user}} crossed the room, the version of himself he’d built cracked.