I Was the One They Were Willing to Lose Chapter 06

I Was the One They Were Willing to Lose Chapter 06

The next afternoon, I ran into Griffin outside my dorm.

He looked like he hadn’t slept-dark circles under his eyes, his shirt badly wrinkled.

In eighteen years, I’d never once seen him look this rattled.

He walked quickly toward me, reaching for my backpack. I stepped aside.

His hand hung in the air a moment. Something flickered across his face-embarrassment.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

“Didn’t hear it.”

“What about the texts?”

“I saw them.”

He stared at me, like he genuinely couldn’t understand why I hadn’t gone to meet him at the airport when I knew he was coming.

Before, whenever any of the three of them traveled, I’d have their flight looked up in advance.

When they landed, I’d be waiting at the exit with water and a jacket.

Griffin used to joke that the moment he saw me, he knew he was home.

Now he’d waited a long time alone at an unfamiliar airport, and I never came.

“This is my first time here. I don’t know the streets.”

“There’s a map app.”

My tone was even. That was somehow what made his eyes go red.

“Wren Calloway. Do you have to talk to me like this?”

“How should I talk to you, then?”

Griffin went quiet.

Maybe it was only now, stripped of every shared memory, that he realized we barely had anything left to say to each other.

He pulled the four-leaf clover bracelet out of his bag.

I’d left it and everything else behind in a drawer before I left.

“Iknow you don’t like the design. I can get you a different one.”

“It’s not about the design.”

“Is it because Poppy has the same one?”

He rushed to explain, “Hers was picked by Beckett. I just thought it’d be sweet if you two matched,

like sisters.”

“Except hers was something all three of you picked out together. Mine was something you grabbed as an afterthought.”

Griffin’s face went pale. He clearly hadn’t expected me to remember it that precisely.

“I’ll admit, I wasn’t thinking that day. But it’s just one gift. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t.”

I looked at him.

“Neither does the Sync Game. Neither does the traveler list. Neither does spending my money to book her hotel. Neither does putting me in a storage closet.”

“Take any single one of those on its own, and it looks like something too small to make a fuss

over.”

“But Griffin-add them all up, and what you get is: you chose her.”

His lips moved. “We never didn’t want you.”

“You just assumed I’d never leave.”

I’d hit the mark.

Color drained slowly from his face.

After a long silence, he said quietly,

“If it’s about the game, I can apologize. Everyone wrote your name that day because we all knew you’d never actually get left behind.”

“The three of us had talked about it too. Poppy’s not strong, she doesn’t have much security-shy needs someone more than you do.”

suddenly felt exhausted.

Even now, he was still emphasizing how much more Poppy needed them.

“So isn’t it a good thing I left?”

“The four of you get to keep being there for each other, and none of you have to feel torn about who to take care of anymore.”

Griffin grabbed my wrist without thinking.

“That’s not it.”

I looked down at his hand. He let go instantly, like he’d been burned.

“Wren, I just… I never thought you’d actually leave. Weren’t we supposed to go to college together?”

“Griffin, didn’t you all say you’d choose me first, no matter what?”

He froze where he stood.

Promises are the kind of thing anyone can throw back in someone’s face.

It’s just that he was the one who’d forgotten his first.

People kept passing by outside the dorm.

Josie stood off to the side, watching me with concern.

I shook my head at her to let her know I was fine.

Griffin followed my gaze, and his voice dropped.

“Come back with me. Please?”

“About the apartment-I already know. We are going to give you the biggest room. Poppy’s already agreed to move to the second bedroom.”

“If you just come back, everything can go back to how it was.”

So they thought swapping a room would be enough to get me back.

“But I don’t want things to go back to how they were.”

I looked at him steadily.

“have my own major here, my own friends, my own life.”

“No one here thinks that because I’in strong, it’s fine to overlook me. No one thinks that because I don’t cry, I don’t need comforting.”

“Griffin. I’m doing really well.”

Those words seemed to hit him harder than any accusation could have.

He stood there a long while before finally putting the bracelet back in its box.

“I’m not giving up.”

“You’ve just gotten used to me being there. Once you’re used to me not being there, you’ll give up.

I turned and walked into the dorm. No footsteps followed behind me.

That night, Poppy sent me a long voice message.

She said, crying, that Griffin had skipped their welcome dinner because he was so busy trying to find me. That Beckett and Julian had been blaming each other over my leaving and hadn’t spoken in

days.

Finally, carefully, she asked,

“Wren, do you have to watch all four of us be miserable before you’ll come back?”

I listened to the whole thing. Then I blocked her too.

Whether they were happy or not had never been my responsibility.