The classroom still smelled faintly of chalk and floor polish, as if the day refused to accept that school was over.
Desks stood in tired rows, their carved initials and ink scars glowing softly under the orange wash of evening light. Outside, graduation music drifted across the courtyard — laughter, ululations, camera shutters, parents calling names that no longer belonged to this place.
But inside the room, time had narrowed to two people and the space between them.
Naliaka stood by the window, fingers curled around the metal frame, feeling the coolness bite into her palm. Her graduation gown rustled when she breathed. She could hear her own heartbeat — too loud, too fast — and the faint scrape of Daniel's shoe behind her.
She didn't turn.
If she turned, something would change forever.
And she still had seconds left where nothing had been broken.
"Lia," he said quietly.
He was the only one who called her that.
The name moved through her like a touch.
She closed her eyes once, hard, then opened them to the football field below. Students ran across the grass in clusters of gowns and joy. Futures beginning. Endings celebrated as beginnings.
Behind her, Daniel took a step closer.
She felt it the way one feels approaching rain — a shift in air pressure, a gathering.
"I've been trying all evening," he said. His voice was calm, but the calm was stretched thin. "Everyone keeps pulling you away."
She forced a small smile he couldn't see. "It's graduation."
"Yes," he said. A pause. "It is."
Silence settled again, thick and waiting.
She knew.
She had known for months.
In the way he watched her when he thought she didn't notice.
In the way his sentences sometimes stopped halfway, as if words frightened him.
In the way he always walked half a step nearer to the road.
Love had been growing between them like a secret tree — roots deep, branches unseen — and tonight it had finally reached the surface.
She tightened her grip on the window.
"Lia," he said again, softer.
She turned.
He stood only a pace away, still in his graduation gown, glasses slightly crooked from the evening's chaos. The setting sun caught in the lenses, hiding his eyes in gold flare — but she knew them by heart. Brown, steady, gentle in a way the world rarely was.
He looked as if he had not breathed in a long time.
For a moment neither spoke.
All the years between them — notes passed, shared lunches, dusty walks home, quiet laughter in libraries — pressed into the air. Every almost, every nearly, every word swallowed.
Then he said it.
"I don't know how to do this in a way that won't change everything."
Her chest clenched.
"So I'll just say it." His voice dropped, rougher now. "I love you."
The words landed without sound, like something vast falling into deep water.
She felt them everywhere at once — ribs, throat, spine — recognition so immediate it was almost relief.
Yes.
Of course.
Always.
He stepped closer, searching her face.
"I have for a long time," he said. "I tried not to. I thought maybe you… didn't. Or maybe you did and didn't want to. I didn't know. But I can't leave this place and pretend you're just…" He swallowed. "Just my friend."
The word hurt him.
It hurt her too.
"I don't think I know how to exist in a world where you're not in it every day," he finished, voice barely above breath.
Her vision blurred.
This was the moment she had imagined and feared — the one where love became choice, and choice became consequence.
If she stepped forward, everything would open.
If she stepped back, everything would close.
She saw, in a single rushing instant, the years ahead:
hers — foreign cities, endless study, loneliness;
his — Nairobi, family, roots, a life she could not share.
Distance. Change. Unequal worlds. Slow breaking.
Better a clean wound now than a life of tearing later.
Her heart screamed at her to move toward him.
She did not.
"Daniel," she said, and her voice sounded strangely steady, as if spoken by someone else. "You're… you're the most important person in my life."
Hope flared across his face — sudden, bright, terrifying.
"And you always will be," she continued.
Hope faltered.
"But," she said.
The word fell between them like a blade.
His shoulders went still.
She forced the lie through a throat that felt lined with glass.
"You're my best friend."
Silence detonated.
For a fraction of a second he didn't understand — she saw it, the mind refusing meaning — and then comprehension moved through him physically, like impact. The light in his eyes shuttered. His mouth parted slightly, not in protest, but in stunned vacancy.
"Oh," he said.
Just that.
Oh.
She felt something inside her tear.
He looked at her as if recalculating the entire world. Every shared moment rearranged under new truth: one-sided, imagined, foolish. She watched him erase himself from her past in real time.
"I see," he said quietly.
He did not see.
She wanted to grab him, shake him, confess everything — I love you too, I love you too, I'm just afraid — but fear held her ribs closed. If she told him now, he would follow her into uncertainty. He would choose her over himself.
She could not allow that.
So she stood very still while he gathered the ruins of himself with dignity.
"Thank you," he said after a moment. The politeness was unbearable. "For being honest."
Honest.
The word burned.
He adjusted his glasses — a small, habitual movement — but his hands were not steady. For the first time since she had known him, he did not meet her eyes.
"I won't make things uncomfortable," he said. "You don't have to worry."
She had never worried about him. Only about losing him.
It was already happening.
He stepped back. The space between them rushed in like cold water.
"Congratulations, Lia," he said. "On the scholarship. You'll… you'll do incredible things."
She could not speak. If she opened her mouth, truth would spill out and undo everything she had just destroyed.
He waited half a heartbeat, as if giving her one last chance to contradict the world he had just learned.
She said nothing.
Something final closed in his face.
"Goodbye," he said.
Not see you.
Not later.
Goodbye.
He turned and walked out of the classroom.
Each step was careful, controlled, as if he were carrying something fragile and broken inside his chest and could not let it spill where anyone might see.
The door clicked softly behind him.
Naliaka remained by the window.
The field below blurred into color. Sound receded. Air thickened.
She did not move until the silence became unbearable.
Then her knees gave way.
She sank to the floor beside the window, gown pooling around her, and pressed her fist to her mouth to stop the sound rising from her throat. It broke through anyway — a strangled, animal sob she had never made before.
Her body knew what her mind had chosen to ignore:
She had just lost the love of her life.
Outside, fireworks cracked the sky in celebration.
Inside, she folded over herself and wept for the boy who believed she had never loved him — and for the truth she had buried alive between them.