I opened the door quietly, hoping to surprise him.

Then I heard my name.

He was in the living room, on the phone. “She walked straight into my trap in high school,” he said. “I’ve been working on this since we were teenagers.” I froze.

“I kept everything. She still has no idea. If she’d found out earlier, the whole plan would have fallen apart.” And then the sentence that took the floor out from under me: “My plan is about to work.”

I slipped back out before he could see me. Sitting in my car, every promise and every coincidence of our life together suddenly looked like something else. Had he loved me — or had I been part of a plan?

Chapter 3 — The Memories

The memories came back on their own. In college, I had filled out an application for a prestigious summer program, lost my nerve at the last second, and thrown it in the trash.