Forward, Without Him Chapter 15

Forward, Without Him Chapter 15

Time kept moving.
By the end of my first month at MIT, the place already felt like home.
That stretch of life was clean and full. Classes, the lab, weekends at Boston Harbor with friends eating lobster rolls.
No drama. No betrayal. Just good days.
I finished freshman year with a 4.0.
Junior year, I was selected for a Nobel laureate’s research group in the Physics department.
Senior year, I received a fully funded direct PhD offer from MIT — full funding, full stipend.
That Thanksgiving, I went home. Mom was carving the turkey when she brought up Ethan and Lexi like gossip she’d been sitting on.
“Ethan ended up with a record. No good school would take him.”
“His dad cut him off completely. He ended up at some no-name community college out of state.”
“And Lexi’s working the register at Target. She actually came back here asking me and your dad for money.”
“We are not that kind of soft, and we told her to get out.”
I watched my mom light up telling it and couldn’t hold back the laugh. I handed her a glass of apple cider.
“Mom, drink something. You’ve been talking for ten minutes straight.”
She gave me a look.
“You better eat more tonight. You’ve lost weight in that lab.”
After the Thanksgiving meal, I stood at the window with a mug of hot cocoa and watched the first snow come down.
My phone buzzed. My advisor had posted a $50 Amazon gift card in the Slack group.
“Happy Holidays, team!”
I grabbed it before anyone else could and sent back a thank-you gif.
I set the phone down and looked back out at the driveway filling with snow.
I thought about the version of me from a few years ago, standing at a fork in the road.
The one who got hit with the worst kind of betrayal and still got back up and started over.
The one who stood in the cold in New York and walked away without looking back.
The one who gathered every piece of evidence and let the rules do exactly what they were there to do.
If I could go back and say something to her, what would it be?
I think I’d say:
You go, girl.
Some people come into your life only to show you what the world is actually capable of.
And some people leave it to make room for something better.
I don’t thank the people who hurt me.
I thank the version of myself that dusted off, stood up in the wreckage, and kept walking forward.
As for Ethan and Lexi?
They don’t even register as characters in my story anymore.
At most, they were something I stepped in by accident. Wiped off and moved on.
The road ahead is long.
And the view from here is looking pretty good.