Months passed.
James was gone from her everyday life, but he wasn't gone from her mind.
She tried to move on. She went to school. She studied. She laughed with her friends.
She acted as though she had accepted everything. But some nights were different.
Those were the nights when memories returned.
The calls.
The laughter.
The promises.
The feeling of being loved.
And then the questions.
Why did he do that?
Was Lawrencia really just a rumor?
Why did he deny it?
Why wasn't I enough?
She had no answers.
Eventually, she found another way to speak.
If she couldn't talk to James directly, she would write.
The first anonymous letter was difficult.
She didn't know how to begin.
She sat with the paper for a long time before finally putting her feelings into words.
She didn't sign her name.
She simply told him about the pain he had caused her.
She told him how much she had cared.
How much she had believed in them.
How much his actions had hurt.
Then she sent it.
She did it again.
And again.
Three letters in total.
Three attempts to say everything she couldn't say to his face.
She didn't know whether he would ever understand who had written them.
Maybe he suspected.
Maybe he didn't.
But writing gave her a strange kind of relief.
For a few minutes, the pain wasn't trapped inside her anymore.
It was on paper.
Outside her.
She could breathe.
Yet James wasn't the only person entering her story.
There was another boy.
Jacob.
He was also someone she knew from JHS.
He had tried to toast her before.
At first, she hadn't taken him seriously.
Then she discovered that Jacob was with Betty, another classmate.
That discovery made her pull away.
She didn't want to become part of something complicated.
But later, Jacob came back. He apologized.
He explained himself. And this time, she listened.
Perhaps she was vulnerable.
Perhaps she was simply tired of being alone.
Perhaps part of her wanted to prove to herself that she could move forward.
Whatever the reason, she gradually agreed to give him a chance.
She wasn't necessarily over James.
She was simply trying to forget.
And sometimes people enter new relationships not because the old love has disappeared, but because the pain of remembering has become unbearable.
Jacob didn't know how much of James was still living inside her.
She didn't even fully understand it herself.
But the journey with Jacob had begun.