Fallon's POV:
"Ishu jump… jump Ishu… jump… save your life!"
The command shattered the silence of my bedroom, pulling me violently from the jagged edges of a recurring nightmare. I bolted upright, my lungs burning as if I had actually been running through the smoke of that eleven-year-old memory. My heart hammered a frantic, irregular rhythm against my ribs—a trapped bird desperate to escape a cage.
I reached for my phone, the blue light blinding in the dark: 5:45 a.m.. Another morning where the sun was late, but the ghosts were right on time.
Turning twenty-three today should be a milestone of adulthood to be celebrated but it doesn't feels like a celebration; it feels like a fraud, like a death a sentence.
No matter how many years I stack on top of that fateful day when I was eleven, I am still that terrified girl standing on the edge. I stared at the date on my screen, wishing I could reach into the digital calendar and delete it. If the day didn't exist, perhaps the weight of survival wouldn't feel so heavy.
"Why?" I whispered to the empty room. It was a question I had asked a thousand times: why did this happen to me?. How could God be so cruel to a child?. I felt the familiar spiral of overthinking beginning to take hold, a darkness that whispered I should just give up on this world and the people in it.
But I couldn't.
My life wasn't truly mine to throw away; I held it in trust for my father, whose sacrifice was the only reason I still drew breath. I lacked the power—or perhaps the right—to end what he had died to save.
Distraction was my only medicine. I slid out of bed, the floorboards cold against my feet, and headed toward the small kitchen we shared in our rented apartment in Washington, D.C.
Graduation is graduation, our final day of college. After the ceremony, we were required to empty the room, a looming deadline that meant our "good trio" was about to face the real world together in a new apartment.
I began to prep breakfast, the rhythmic sound of a knife against a cutting board grounding me.
I thought back to when how I first met Elsa Kingsley and Amber Blackwood in our shared college hostel.
We hadn't been friends then; we were three parallel lines that refused to intersect. We didn't look at each other in the hallways, acting as though the other person was invisible, retreating into our own private solitudes.
It was explainable, of course. Elsa and I were survivors.
I had just finished my Master's in physics, a world of cold logic and hard facts that I used to shield my heart.
Elsa, studying interior design, was just as guarded, her "cold nature" and sharp-tongued taunts acting as a defense mechanism for the hardships she had suffered at a young age.
But then there was Amber.
Amber, pursuing her Bachelor's in ceramic pottery, was the "sunshine" we didn't know we needed. Unlike us, she came from a beautiful, loving family, and that light reflected in everything she did. She was disappointed by our initial coldness, but she refused to let it break her dream of a sisterhood. She forced us out of our shells, dragging us on college trips and to loud parties until the walls we built finally crumbled for her.
Now, we understood each other in ways even our families never could.
When Elsa was angry and gave those sharp taunts, we didn't flinch anymore. We knew that by morning, she would be standing in the kitchen, offering a quiet "sorry" as we made breakfast together. We had become each other's safe harbor.
As the smell of coffee filled the room, my thoughts shifted to the one dark spot in our sanctuary: Xaden Ridley.
As the only son of Luke Ridley and sole heir to the Ridley Prime Tech empire, explains exactly why he treats the world like his personal playground and everyone in it like a disposable toy.
Xaden carries the kind of inherited arrogance that it's no mystery why he's such a spoiled brat—when you're born at the top of the Ridley empire, you never learn how to climb.
The math of Amber and Xaden just doesn't add up. It wasn't the lure of the Ridley fortune that drew her in and certainly not a case of a girl falling for a golden ticket—Amber has her own gold and she was never a girl who need rescuing.
Her parents are among the most celebrated artists in the nation. Born into a dynasty of legendary artists, her family name is synonymous with the country's cultural history, having gifted the world generations of renowned masters.
She was raised surrounded by beauty and legacy, which makes it all the more baffling that she would choose someone as colorless and hollow as Xaden Ridley.
Amber was head over heels in love with him, but Elsa and I saw him for what he was—a negative vibe, a man who wasn't trustworthy and was merely playing with her heart.
We had warned her a hundred times to break up with him, but love had made her deaf to our logic.
Tonight was the after-graduation party. Amber was determined to go with him, and despite our exhaustion and my own looming shadows, Elsa and I had already made a silent pact. We were going with her. Not because we wanted to celebrate, but because we didn't trust Xaden even a little bit.
I turned off the stove as the first light of my twenty-third year began to bleed through the curtains. I was a physicist who couldn't explain her own heart, a survivor who was still drowning, but as I heard my roommates beginning to stir in their rooms, I felt a flicker of something other than fear. I had them. And for now, that was enough to keep the nightmares at bay.
Thank you for reading.
And please stay with me until the end of this novel.