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My throat gets thick, and I tighten my grip on the banister.

It’s like I’m watching her through two lenses at once. In one eye, she’s Moira Murray—the golden girl always a step away from taking everything I want.

Of course she won the scholarship. It was always going to be her. As I sped over to the school after waking up in the middle of the afternoon with a dry mouth and a pounding headache, I realized my blind rush out the door wasn’t about salvaging my shot at the scholarship.

It was about showing up to watch her win, to concede, to give in to the grim future I’d been scrambling to avoid and make my peace with putting all my career dreams on hold.

That would all be a hell of a lot easier if my other eye wasn’t watching her through a different lens, one that won’t let me forget what it feels like to have my body pressed to hers, to watch her move in dim candlelight, to dance with her, to laugh with her until neither of us can breathe.

“Kenzie, I shouldn’t have said it like that, but please, take the scholarship. I want you to have it. You need—”

“Yeah, I know what you think I need.” The words force their way out of the bitter, twisted part of me that’s snarling with pain. “You told the whole room what you think I need, but you’re wrong. I don’t need money I wasn’t good enough to win. What I need is...Right now, what I need is to get the fuck out of here.”

I will myself to get to my feet, but no part of me moves, not even when I break our joined gaze and stare down at the door to the lobby instead. I can hear the muffled chatter of the crowd out there now, and a brief moment of the nausea returns when I realize I’m going to have to walk past them all.

“Kenzie, please. I’m sorry.” Moira’s voice is barely more than a whisper. “When you looked at me, when you were out in the crowd, I thought...I thought you wanted to try again. I thought you were saying you hadn’t given up on us.”

My voice drops to a whisper too as the outline of the door gets blurry. “I was trying to say goodbye. For real. I was trying to say it was okay that you won. I never should have been competing in the first place. I’m just going to take the time off school, and—”

“Goddammit, Kenzie!”

Moira’s shout echoes off the walls, and the Crocs I didn’t even notice she was wearing bang against the edge of a step as she kicks her feet in emphasis.

A morbid urge to laugh takes over me, but I’m too stunned by the force of her voice to make any noise.

“Look, I know I fucked up just now,” she says, her cheeks and neck red as she leans forward to call my attention back to her face, “but that aside, why the hell do you keep saying you have to do things, you have to be a certain way, you have to, you have to, you have to...It doesn’t make sense. I know I’m never going to totally understand the things you’ve been through, but I don’t get how you can tell me I’m enough and watch me listen to you and then turn around and ignore me when I tell you the exact same thing.”

Her chest is heaving by the time she finishes, and she shakes her head a few times as I sit there, unable to move or speak.

A tiny, beat-down part of me crawls out of hiding to drink up her words.

“You told me I don’t need to be something I’m not, and I’m telling you the same thing. You’re good enough. You’re more than good enough, and you don’t have to keep stuffing yourself into some mold of what you think absolute perfection looks like. I didn’t...I didn’t fall for the perfect version of you.”

I can’t hold my gasp in. “Moira...”

She glances away when I don’t go on and clears her throat. “It’s true. Maybe you don’t feel that way, but I—”

“I do,” I blurt, because even now, I can’t stand to see her hurting. “I fell for you too, Moira, and if things were different, maybe—”

“So let them be different.” She leans closer, her eyes shining. “Take the scholarship. Keep going to school. Keep...keep me.”

She’s so close all I’d have to do is reach for her and pull her mouth to mine, but I don’t. I can’t, and along with that realization comes the echo of her question to me.

Why do I keep saying I have to do these things? Be this way?

The words keep crashing and colliding until only a single one rings out clear.

Why?

Why can’t I do what she’s asking? Why am I saying no before even asking myself what it would mean to say yes?

The question is so disorienting I have to shake my head to clear it. The room is starting to spin again, and none of this makes any sense. I don’t know up from down anymore.

“Things fell apart, Moira.” I say her name, but I’m mostly talking to myself. “It’s like I’ve been outrunning this force waiting to suck me down, down, down for way too long, and it finally caught me. It...it caught Chris, and it could take everything down just like it almost took him.”

An image of him lying stretched out in the ambulance flashes through my mind, his body jerking as grim-faced paramedics worked to bring him back from the brink.

“I asked for too much. I tried to...to rise above it all, but I can’t. I can’t have it all. You think I’m enough, but...look at what happened.”