Beth, still trembling, reached for her phone on the nightstand—a reflex more than intention, her fingers cold against the plastic. She scrolled, half-conscious, just needing something to distract. Something loud. Something unreal.
A headline caught her eye:
"Aglaya & Sanlu: New Freestyle Track Leaked—Caught by Paparazzi Outside Paris Club."
The video had already spread across early internet forums—grainy, low-res, lit only by flashing lights from a crowd of phones and paparazzi flashes. Someone had uploaded the audio to a fan site.
Beth tapped play.
The beat came in first—loose, pulsing, unmistakably theirs.
Sanlu's voice dropped in:
"I told Saint Nick he's a myth / like Pascal's Wager in a gift wrap twist—"
Then Aglaya, smooth and sharp like silk through glass:
"If there's a god, where's the snow for Sudan? / You bring toys, I bring the existential scan—"
The crowd in the video whooped.
Beth blinked, mouth slightly parted, trying to decide whether to laugh or frown. The verses spiraled—half spoken-word philosophy, half performance-art satire. They rhymed Epiphany with solipsistically, and somewhere in there was a line about "replacing incense with high-speed internet."
She let the track run.
"There's no savior in red suits, just branding / drop the chimney, we're crash-landing."
And the chorus, sung ironically over sleigh bells:
"Oh holy capitalism, divine / keep the myth if the marketing's fine."
It was… ridiculous.
Bold.
Completely them.
And somehow, it worked.
Beth let out a soft laugh, breathless and surprised.
The video's grain flickered, unstable from a shaky phone camera—paparazzi caught in chaos, the bassline pounding beneath muffled screams and laughter. The crowd swayed like waves, bodies pressing into each other beneath a canopy of colored lights and smoke.
Beth's eyes scanned the frame.
There—Gabe, unmistakable, tall and loose-limbed, holding a ridiculous-looking silver goblet aloft like some medieval prince, grinning as he spun with some girl in a red vinyl dress.
Then the camera tilted slightly—
And there he was.
Leon.
Hair tousled, shirt open at the collar, caught mid-laugh beneath the club lights. One arm draped around Bar's waist. And then—he bent down, casually, naturally, without ceremony or thought—and kissed her.
Long.
Not desperate. Not passionate. Just familiar. Practiced.
Beth's stomach turned.
Not out of jealousy, not exactly. It was worse than that—because it didn't even look like love. It looked like habit. Like he was just there, going through the motions, playing the part he'd always played.
The camera shook again, caught more dancing, more noise. But Beth had already stopped watching.
She stared at her screen.
Her hand trembled again—but not from a nightmare this time. From clarity.
The kind that settled in like cold air through a crack in the window.
Leon had forgotten her birthday. Had turned her away in a hospital room. And now, he was back to kissing Bar under strobe lights while Aglaya rapped about God and marketing strategies.
Beth turned the phone over and laid it facedown on her bedside table.
Then she lay back, pulled the covers to her chin, and stared at the ceiling.
It didn't hurt as much as it used to.
But it still hurt.
Beth tossed in her sleep, tangled in her blankets, her breath quickening as the dream unfolded with a strange, slow inevitability.
She was standing in Helena's hospital room. The pale green curtains swayed as if moved by a breeze that didn't exist. The walls were too quiet, the clock ticking too loudly.
Chris was there.
Amanda beside him.
They leaned into each other. Kissed.
Beth blinked—confused, unsettled. "What are you doing?" she tried to say, but her voice didn't come.
Then Chris and Amanda began to blur, like wet paint bleeding together on a canvas.
They changed.
Became Bar and Leon.
Bar in that same shimmering dress Beth had seen in the video, her hair glossy, her face perfect. Leon looking exactly as he always did in dreams—wounded and beautiful and impossibly far away.
And then Bar vanished.
As if she had never been real at all.
Leon turned his head slowly, eyes locking onto Beth's. His expression unreadable. Something moved behind his gaze—something heavy.
Beth stepped back. Her throat tightened.
But then his face began to change. It rippled, like a reflection in disturbed water.
Leon's eyes shifted to a softer blue.
His features settled into something steadier. Kinder.
Jefrey.
Beth gasped awake.
The room was dark again. Still. Her heart thundered in her chest.
And for the second night in a row, Beth lay awake, unsure of what she wanted. Or worse—who.
It was 5:03 a.m.
Beth's room was still cloaked in pre-dawn gray, the sky outside a cold slate. She couldn't sleep, not after the dream. Not with her mind ricocheting between memories and questions she couldn't answer.
She reached for her phone again. The glow of the screen hurt her eyes.
And there it was—trending at the top of her feed.
"Twilight City Heartthrob Leon Troy's Public Meltdown in Paris."
The headline was cruel, even if the photos underneath tried to feign neutrality.
First:
Leon, unmistakable despite the black polo cap pulled low over his brow, and the oversized sunglasses hiding half his face.
He wore black shorts and a black short-sleeved T-shirt—in December.
Paris.
He looked out of place. Disoriented.
Caught like an animal in headlights.
One photo showed his hand outstretched, shielding his face from a crowd of paparazzi. Another caught the precise moment he turned away from the flashing bulbs, jaw clenched, his lips forming something that might have been a curse or a plea.
But it was the second set of photos that made Beth's breath hitch.
Leon, sitting on a public chair—maybe outside a café or near the Seine.
Head bowed.
Hands tangled in his hair.
His entire posture crumpled inward like paper burned at the edges.
And in one brutal frame, his face lifted just enough to reveal the tears streaking down his cheek—sharp and glossy under the camera light.
Still impossibly beautiful.
Even while unraveling.
Beth stared at the image.
It didn't feel like victory.
It didn't even feel like clarity.
It just felt… hollow.
Because love, she realized, doesn't vanish in headlines or fade out through distance.
And pain, no matter how deserved or self-inflicted, still hurts to witness—especially when the face is one you once kissed beneath summer stars.
She turned off the phone.
Closed her eyes.
And let the silence finally settle over her like snow.
Beth's thumb hesitated above the screen for only a moment before she unlocked it again.
She scrolled past the headlines. Past the clickbait commentary. Past the hashtags and cruel edits and sympathy posts. Straight to the gallery of images—the raw photos, unfiltered.
She zoomed in on the photo of Leon slumped in the chair, his head bowed, his hand caught mid-motion near his temple. A shield, a tremble, or both.
And then, in the background—just out of focus, slightly blurred by distance and lens distortion—she saw them.
Gabe. Kevin. Rene.
Standing off to the side of the square, not posing. Not hiding. Just there.
Not looking at the cameras.
Looking only at him.
Gabe's arms were crossed tightly, his mouth a tense line.
Kevin, mid-step, looked like he was about to walk toward Leon but had stopped, unsure.
And Rene—always the carefree one—stood stiffly, his hands shoved into his jacket pockets, his eyes trained sharply on the scene unfolding before them.
They weren't paparazzi bait. They weren't part of the performance.
They looked like friends.
Worried ones.
Beth stared for a long time.
It said something that they were still there. Not interfering. Not abandoning. Just present.
Even when he was falling apart.
Even when he pushed everyone else away.
Her fingers hovered over the screen. She didn't save the image. Didn't need to.
It had already burned itself into her.
Some part of her that had tried so hard to freeze over… cracked.
Not melted.
But cracked.
The weight of it landed all at once—quiet but sharp.
Beth sat back against her pillows, her phone slowly dimming in her hand, the image of Leon and his shadowed circle still echoing behind her eyes. And with it came something she hadn't expected to feel, hadn't wanted to feel.
Jealousy.
Not of Bar. Not even of Clare.
But of them—the circle that surrounded Leon like orbiting moons.
Aglaya, Sanlu, Gabe, Kevin, Rene, Clare.
They knew.
They all knew.
They knew about her. They knew about Linda. They probably knew more than Beth ever had about herself in that whole relationship. And Beth—what did she know of them?
Nothing that hadn't come through the paparazzi.
Nothing that hadn't been filtered through gossip, Chris's encyclopedic celebrity knowledge, or blurry pictures hanging on Leon's wall.
Leon had told them about Beth. But he'd never told Beth about them.
And there it was—that cold truth sitting in her chest like glass.
He had wanted her for himself—for a quiet, secret pocket of affection—but never truly with him. Never within the whirlwind of his life, just barely skirting the edges of it. A summer chapter he refused to name aloud.
And she had gone along with it.
Maybe she'd believed he was protecting her.
Maybe he had been.
But what he hadn't done was invite her in.
And now, they knew all about her. Her heartbreak. Her tears. Her birthday, probably. Linda. All of it.
And she knew nothing in return.
Beth set the phone face-down again.
This time, she didn't pick it up.
The words echoed again, "Just go."
They'd been barely above a whisper. But in Beth's memory, they were louder than any shout.
She turned her face into the pillow, as if burying her thoughts could drown the ache swelling inside her chest.
He had said it to her—not to Sanlu when he'd cracked careless jokes, not to Aglaya when she'd lit his cigar with a smile and slipped a hand down the back of his shirt in full view of others. Not to Gabe, Kevin, or Rene when they carried on in their elegant indifference, treating every moment of Leon's life like a stylized film shoot.
But to her.
The one who had walked to his hospital room. The one who had searched clinics and maps with trembling hands and sleepless eyes. The one who had said, "I'll fight for us."
"Just go."
It wasn't a punishment. Not even anger.
It had been something worse: rejection masked as mercy. The soft cruelty of someone who couldn't imagine letting the mess of his life touch her—yet had never trusted her enough to share it, either.
Sanlu could smirk. Aglaya could flirt. Clare could stroke his hair while he fell apart in her lap. But Beth? Beth was supposed to go.
The unfairness hit her like ice water.
Why was it her who had to leave? The one who had stayed up nights. Who had forgiven. Who had waited.
She sat upright, tears welling unbidden, hot against her cheeks.
This wasn't just heartbreak. This was being made invisible in a story she was in.
And in the cold, electric silence of early morning, she knew something had changed. Something that might never be repaired—not even with apologies, not even with flowers and letters and perfect smiles.
She had loved him. Still did.
But maybe that wasn't the same as being loved back.
Beth sat motionless for a moment, the words still trembling on her lips like the final breath of a ghost.
"Lenored A. Forshevelle, I renounce you from my heart."
It didn't feel dramatic. It felt true.
Like the closing of a book whose pages she had reread too many times, hoping the ending might change.
She stood, walked to the window, and drew the curtain back slightly. The world outside was still gray, the morning not yet fully formed. The bare branches of the trees stretched skyward like veins, silent witnesses to her quiet resolve.
Then, aloud—still soft, but no longer shaky:
"Farewell, Lenored A. Forshevelle. May your spirit fade with the winds of Reine."
There was no audience. No cinematic score. Just her, the ghost of a love she had clung to too tightly, and the faint beginning of dawn.
Beth wiped the corners of her eyes with her sleeve.
Then she breathed in.
And let go.