She was sixteen the night the world rearranged itself and left an empty place where laughter used to live. They’d been too young to know the shape of consequences: music in the car, a joke that landed wrong, a hand on the wheel that slipped. A headlight. Glass. Silence that never stopped echoing. One friend gone, and the mirror became her punishment — every reflection carrying his shadow behind her shoulder, his eyes full of a word she could never say. Sometimes, she swore she saw his mouth move in the glass, shaping blame she could almost hear. It wasn’t hatred that haunted her — it was fear. Fear that he was still there, watching, disappointed. That somewhere between the crash and the quiet, she had become the villain in his memory.

She left her old town for Thunder Bay because staying meant drowning in ghosts. Her parents offered comfort, but she couldn’t take it; she didn’t want them to see what she had become. So she left — said it was for art school, for a new beginning — and built herself a life out of scraps. A one-room apartment that always smelled like turpentine and rain. A grocery store shift from five to eleven, a spa cleaning job from midnight to three. The hours blurred until sleep was a rumor and exhaustion a second skin.

She didn’t complain. She didn’t hate the rich. She didn’t even envy them. She accepted the way the world divided itself — those who got to dream and those who had to survive. She wasn’t bitter, not exactly. Just... tired. Tired of being invisible and pretending it didn’t hurt.

Her art was the only thing that still looked back at her kindly. Each sketch a confession. Each stroke of color a heartbeat.

And then one night, everything slowed down.

It was 3 a.m. The streets were quiet, washed silver by the streetlights. She stepped out of the spa, her breath fogging in the cold, and saw him — Will Grayson — sitting on the curb just across the street. A bruise blooming on his cheek, a small cut tracing his temple, cigarette glowing between his fingers like a dying star.

He looked careless, unbothered, a boy carved out of everything she wasn’t — wealth, ease, chaos. Smoke curled from his mouth as he tilted his head toward her, not surprised, not apologetic. Just there.

For a moment, neither of them moved. The night held its breath.