Chapter 1: The Night My World Ended

We started in high school sweatshirts, ended in wedding gowns—and now, I’m the only one left to wear mine.

It's strange how the smallest memories can hit the hardest. I can still smell the burnt coffee on Evan’s sleeve and hear our laughter echoing in the empty library, the way we joked about tripping down the aisle at prom. Those memories seem so close, but now—with everything that's happened—they’re blurred at the edges, like a Polaroid left out in the rain.

But on the eve of our wedding, Evan died unexpectedly.

There are moments when pain feels so sharp you could reach out and touch it. That night, I clung to the dress bag hanging in my closet, the plastic crinkling under my fists as I pressed my face into the satin, desperate for a trace of his cologne. I sobbed so hard the world tilted sideways. The house was full of flowers and silence—the kind that presses on your chest until you can barely breathe.

I cried until I nearly blacked out, but then, right before my eyes, chat bubbles blinked to life, hovering in the air—like my grief had leaked into someone else’s group chat:

[Can someone tell the heartbroken heroine he’s only faking his death?]

[Evan’s little songbird ran away when she heard he was getting married, so he faked his death overnight and went overseas to chase her. The heroine is crying at the grave, the songbird is crying in bed, I’m losing it.]

[What a joke. When he comes back after faking his death, the heroine doesn’t know a thing and still happily marries him...]

I wiped my face, half convinced I was seeing things—a cruel trick of exhaustion. But the messages hovered there, persistent as gnats, impossibly real in their digital glow.