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Chapter 35: Road Trip

last update Petsa ng paglalathala: 2026-07-05 00:33:43

By seven on Friday morning, Easton’s parking lot was already loud with rolling suitcases, overlapping conversations, and the kind of forced energy that only exists when a large group of people have agreed to be awake before they’re ready. Melissa stood beside the charter bus with a clipboard and a coffee, looking completely unbothered while the rest of us looked like we’d lost a bet.

Ava yawned beside me as we dragged our luggage across the pavement. “If I ever agree to leave campus before s
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    The drive back to campus unfolded in a strange, stretched quiet that made everything outside the car feel sharper by contrast. People moved through their evenings without hesitation—laughing outside restaurants, weaving through traffic, carrying bags of takeout like nothing in the world had shifted—while inside the car, something had. Dean drove with the same steady focus he always had, one hand resting lightly on the wheel, the other adjusting the radio once before leaving it off entirely. The silence wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t neutral either. It had weight. I broke first. “I went to the hospital.” He didn’t look at me, but his grip on the wheel tightened just enough that I noticed. “Mrs. Hart is diabetic,” I continued, watching the blur of headlights instead of him. “When Mason texted me, that’s where my brain went. I thought something had happened to her.” Dean nodded once, almost imperceptibly, and I pushed forward before I lost momentum. “They told me she was stable whe

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    The ride back to campus should have cleared my head, but instead it stretched everything out, giving my thoughts too much room to come back to themselves. Outside the bus windows, the city moved with its usual indifference—students weaving through traffic with coffee cups and deadlines, someone chasing a bus they’d already missed, couples arguing over directions like it mattered more than anything else they’d do that day. Life kept going. Mine felt suspended somewhere between a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic and a playground that still echoed with things left unsaid. Mason’s voice lingered in my head, not the whole conversation, just the part that mattered. One sentence. That was all he’d ever wanted. Twenty-two years of trying to earn something that should have been given freely, and it still came down to hearing I’m proud of you. It sounded simple when you stripped it down like that, almost childish, but there was nothing simple about it. I understood that kind of hung

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    By Tuesday afternoon, life had settled into something that almost felt normal again—at least on the surface. Campus had already moved on to fresher gossip, but the internet refused to let the Mercer gala fade. Arthur Mercer’s remarks had become the week’s most recycled headline, dissected across sports blogs and business columns alike, each article offering a new prediction—hostile takeovers, fractured partnerships, the unraveling of collegiate hockey alliances.Dean, unsurprisingly, found the entire situation entertaining.“I’ve always wanted to be part of a family feud,” he said over breakfast, scrolling through yet another article while balancing his phone against a half-eaten piece of toast. “Makes Christmas sound a lot more interesting.”I leaned back in my chair, coffee in hand. “You’re assuming your family celebrates Christmas instead of holding an annual shareholders’ meeting.”“We do both.”“I don’t believe you.”“My grandmother once gave my uncle a quarterly financial report

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    By the time I wandered into Dean’s kitchen the next morning, Arthur Mercer had become the city’s favorite headline. Every channel had found a way to replay the same clip, looping his voice with the kind of urgency reserved for breaking news.“We stopped measuring ourselves against the Hart Group a long time ago.”Commentators filled the silence between repeats, each one more certain than the last about what it meant. Some framed it as a warning shot, others as the opening move in a corporate war, and at least one analyst spoke with the confidence of someone who had clearly never been in the same room as either man.Dean stood at the counter, pouring coffee with the calm of someone who had grown up inside this kind of noise and learned early not to react to it.“They’re acting like your dad just declared war,” I said, nodding toward the television as I took the mug he handed me.“They’re journalists,” he replied, leaning back against the counter. “Worst-case scenarios are their job.”“

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    “Engaged?” The word escaped before I could stop it. Dean nodded, and the room seemed to shift around me. The half-eaten birthday cake, the gifts we’d been laughing over five minutes earlier, even the oversized hoodie I’d stolen from him and fully intended to keep, suddenly faded into the background. I sat on the edge of my bed, more because I needed a second to process than because my legs had given up. “Can I ask you something?” “You can.” “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” “I won’t answer if I can’t.” I studied him for a moment before asking the question that had been quietly waiting in the back of my mind since he’d mentioned Lucas. “What happened between Lucas and Melissa?” Dean reached for the bottle of water beside him, turning it slowly between his hands before answering. “They met in high school. They were together for years. Long enough that nobody questioned it. If you knew Lucas, you knew Melissa.” “I’ve only known them a few months,” I admit

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