The rest of Christmas passed like a half-remembered dream.
The hospital room where Helena lay, fragile but smiling, was lit softly by string lights that Amanda had insisted on putting up. A faint carol played from a small radio, its sound distant, like it was playing for another time, another family.
Amanda sat at Helena's bedside, reading aloud from one of her mother's favorite books—Persuasion, one hand curled over Helena's, the other stroking her hair like she had when she was a child. Chris had brought in lukewarm takeaway coffee and too many candy canes. He kept making jokes that didn't quite land. But no one stopped him, because at least he was trying.
Jefrey stood quietly at the window for most of the afternoon, his hands in his pockets, his back tense. Once, he turned toward Beth, opened his mouth to say something—but closed it again. She only nodded at him, and it was enough.
There were presents left unopened in the corner.
Cards left unread.
The tree back at Grandma Sophie's stood untouched now, the lights Beth had once loved seeming dimmer somehow, even when they blinked.
Beth didn't talk about Leon again.
No one brought him up.
They were too busy counting hours between Helena's medication. Too busy memorizing the way she smiled when Chris sang Christmas hymns off-key. Too busy being present for something real.
And when night came, and the hospital went quiet again, Beth stepped into the hallway alone, watching snow begin to fall outside.
She didn't wish for Leon.
She didn't cry.
Instead, she thought of how Jefrey had carried Helena's favorite blanket in without being asked.
How Amanda had learned the names of every nurse on the floor.
How Chris, for once, hadn't mentioned a single celebrity in hours.
And she felt something else settle inside her—something small, but solid.
Grief, yes.
But also grace.
A different kind of love.
The kind that stays.
Even through December. Even through endings.
When Beth returned to high school in Oxford that January, the world felt sharper somehow—like the frost that edged the windowpanes, the kind that lingered even into the early afternoons.
The halls hadn't changed.
The students hadn't changed.
She had.
But there was one thing Beth hadn't anticipated fully—how present Leon Troy had become in everyone's conversation.
He was everywhere.
In whispers behind lockers.
On the covers of Seventeen and Teen Vogue magazines tucked between textbooks.
On screens where girls huddled at lunch, watching the trailer for Twilight City, some of them gasping, others laughing, all of them mesmerized.
"He's like DiCaprio, but softer," one girl said, dreamily.
"No, he's more tortured. You can tell something tragic happened to him," said another.
"Imagine dating someone like that," a third sighed.
Beth smiled politely when she heard those comments. She learned quickly how to nod at the right places, how to feign vague interest, how to say "He's definitely talented."
Because no one at school knew.
No one knew she had once kissed him in golden twilight in Norway.
No one knew he had ever said "Will you marry me?"
No one knew she had seen him weep into someone else's lap while asking her to leave.
No one knew about Clare, or Bar, or the way Leon held himself like a poem waiting to be edited.
And Beth was thankful for that.
Because here, she didn't have to perform.
Here, she could focus on her coursework. She could finish her last year. She could laugh with friends who saw her as Beth Gibson, not as a footnote in a celebrity romance.
She didn't want to be envied. She didn't want to be pitied. She didn't want to be recognized.
She just wanted to breathe.
So she let them talk.
She let the fantasy swirl around her in lunchrooms and after-class chatter.
And when she walked home in the evening, under a sky that sometimes looked a little too much like Reine, she allowed herself to feel the weight of it quietly. The hurt, yes—but also the distance she'd gained.
He belonged to the world now.
And Beth?
Beth belonged to herself again.
The first letter arrived on a Thursday in mid-March.
Beth had been sitting cross-legged on the carpet of her bedroom, surrounded by highlighters and practice exam papers, when Amanda burst through the door without knocking.
"There's a letter," she announced, out of breath and flushed from the cold. "From St Andrews."
Beth froze.
Amanda held out the envelope like it was made of glass.
White. Thin. Heavy with something more than just words.
Beth took it with shaking hands.
She opened it carefully, with the tip of her nail, barely breathing as her eyes scanned the words:
We are pleased to inform you…
She dropped back against her bed, a single breath of relief escaping her lips.
Amanda whooped. "I told you!"
That weekend, two more offers came—one from UCL and another from Edinburgh.
Each envelope became easier to open. Each acceptance steadied her.
It was Oxford's letter that arrived last.
She didn't open it right away.
Not because she was afraid—but because she wasn't sure if she needed it anymore. There had been a time when Oxford had symbolized everything: tradition, prestige, proximity to home. But that version of herself felt far away now.
Still, she opened it on a quiet Sunday evening.
Congratulations.
Conditional offer.
Beth smiled, closed the envelope, and tucked it beside the others.
She didn't cry. She didn't cheer.
Instead, she sat by the window with a mug of tea, watching as the last of the March light disappeared behind the rooftops.
And for the first time in what felt like years, she allowed herself to imagine a life that had nothing to do with Leon Troy. A life shaped not by headlines or heartbreaks, but by her own choices.
University wasn't the future—it was the beginning of something entirely her own.
And Beth was ready.
Easter came and went with none of its promise.
No resurrection.
No spring.
Only the slow withering of hope in a too-sterile hospital room that smelled faintly of antiseptic and lilies.
Helena was no longer speaking much. She drifted in and out, her hand light in Beth's grip, her breath thinner by the hour. Amanda had taken to sleeping in the chair beside her, while Chris tried to keep spirits up by humming hymns and reciting Easter passages that no one had the heart to tell him only made it worse.
Jefrey, quiet and efficient, took over the logistics—making sure the nurses had what they needed, picking up prescriptions, keeping track of bills they now couldn't afford.
And the bills had piled up.
Somewhere in February, without warning or explanation, Leon's payments had stopped.
No message.
No apology.
Just silence, and then invoices.
Beth never mentioned it. Not even to Amanda or Jefrey. What was there to say? That she had trusted someone who never really saw her? That her once-fiancé had disappeared behind velvet ropes and red carpets?
It was GQ UK that made it unbearable.
Every bookstore, every newsstand, every passing train kiosk seemed to mock her with that cover.
Leon Troy.
In a grey Burberry cashmere sweater, slouched off one shoulder like it had simply fallen that way. His head turned slightly toward the camera. A lit cigar balanced elegantly between his fingers. His gaze fixed somewhere just beyond reach—brooding, wounded, mythic.
The tagline read:
"The Prince of Smoke: Leon Troy on Fame, Fragility, and Becoming a Man."
Beth stood in front of the magazine rack at Paddington Station for a full minute before turning away.
She didn't cry. She didn't buy the magazine.
But her hands shook the entire train ride back.
That night, sitting at Helena's bedside, she reached into her bag and pulled out an old, folded photo. One of Reine. The fjord in golden light. Two figures laughing, side by side. One of them was her.
She stared at it for a long time, then placed it gently under Helena's pillow.
So much had changed.
So much had fallen away.
But Beth was still here.
Still loving.
Still choosing to love, even as everything else slipped through her fingers like sand.
Because that was what Helena had always taught her:
Love wasn't just the fairy tale.
It was the staying. Even when it hurt.
Especially when it hurt.
Worse still—far worse, Beth thought bitterly—was the sound of Aglaya and Sanlu's voices, silky and smug, cascading through London like perfume you didn't ask to wear.
Their newest album, "Kiss Me Until I Became a Precept of Berkeley," had dropped three days before Easter. Now it was everywhere. On shop radios. Blasting from taxis. Spinning on the street corners where aspiring dancers twisted themselves into Aglaya-inspired moves. And always—always—someone was quoting it like scripture.
Beth had tried to ignore it.
But you can't ignore Aglaya and Sanlu. They didn't just release music. They released statements.
That title alone—
Kiss Me Until I Became a Precept of Berkeley.
It was so them. Half philosophy, half seduction. Vaguely intellectual, deliberately provocative. Beth didn't know whether to laugh or throw something. It sounded like a joke written during a drunken debate in a university common room—and yet it was currently the number one album in the UK.
One lyric played in a clothing store as she walked by:
"You said I was illusion, I said I was idea,
Now we're kissing on the ruins of the kingdom of fear."
The beat was heavy. Sensual. Ironic.
Beth flinched. She could hear Leon in it. Not his voice, but his shadow. He belonged to their world. He always had.
Sanlu had once called her and Leon's heartbreak "childish" in that hospital room.
Now he was rapping about "epistemic intimacy" while girls in Camden wore shirts with Aglaya's face on them.
Beth had to leave the store. The air was too warm. The world too loud.
She sat alone on a bench, outside a pharmacy, watching a couple laugh over their melting ice creams. The girl wore earbuds, and Beth could make out the chorus bleeding through.
"Touch me, don't believe me, kiss me, don't perceive me—
I disappear unless you look away."
It was beautiful.
It was clever.
It made Beth want to scream.
Helena was dying.
The bills were stacking.
And the boy who'd once kissed her on a cliffside was now a perfect silhouette in a sweater, a footnote in Aglaya's art project, a myth, a brand, a fantasy.
Beth wrapped her coat tighter and walked home.
The wind carried Aglaya's voice behind her like a perfume trail she couldn't outrun.
Leon's face was on bus stops. Aglaya's voice was in grocery stores. Sanlu's lyrics had started showing up scrawled across notebooks in the school library.
It wasn't just fame—it was invasion.
Beth couldn't open a magazine without seeing some iteration of Leon's face. Not smiling—brooding. Not speaking—smoldering. Always in sweaters that slouched off his shoulder, always with cheekbones sharper than whatever critics had to say about his acting. And it wasn't just the movies. It was the narrative.
They had taken heartbreak and doom and repackaged it into beautiful pain. Aglaya and Sanlu's lyrics about epistemology and kissing beneath the wreckage. Leon dying poetically in Twilight City, blood pooling beside a white rose, Clare sobbing in gauze and diamonds. Posters for Call Me 'Goodbye' still lingered in corners of the Tube, even though the film had been out for months.
And the thing that enraged Beth most wasn't the fame.
It was that none of it was earned.
Leon had only made two movies last year. Two. And in Call Me 'Goodbye', the most quoted, most gut-punched line wasn't even his. Abby—Abby something, she had to look her up—was the one who whispered, "Call me 'Goodbye'… because that's all I'll ever be to you," while looking at him. And he'd just stood there. Beautiful. Silent. Moody.
It was like watching someone make a career out of being stared at.
Meanwhile Beth had to scrape up bus fare, organize hospital rotations, and pretend not to hear the giggles behind her at school when someone played an Aglaya lyric on their phone.
She was older now.
Not just eighteen on paper—but aged by grief, by nights in hospital chairs, by the quiet understanding that no romantic line, no eyeliner-smudged monologue in a fictional apocalypse, could match the realness of watching someone you love fade away.
Beth had once walked beside a boy in the fjords of Norway and believed the world was poetry.
Now she watched that same boy—lit perfectly, styled gorgeously, reduced to a marketing vehicle—turn longing into currency.
But Beth Gibson wasn't seventeen anymore.
She didn't need longing.
She needed peace.