After my boyfriend fell asleep, I noticed his phone lighting up with notification after notification.
I tapped the screen and found he'd posted an answer under an online thread titled: "How far would you go for the person you loved as a teenager but could never have?"
"I've been in love with my childhood sweetheart for twelve years, but I'm with someone I don't love."
"My sweetheart had someone she was crazy about. To help her find happiness, I went after the girl her crush liked — my current girlfriend — to get rid of the competition for her."
"Now she and her crush are about to get married. As for me? She's not the one I'm with, so it doesn't matter who is."
That was when I realized I was the girlfriend he didn't love.
My hand shook, and the phone slipped onto the bed.
Jacob Harding didn't wake up, but his body shifted toward me on instinct, and he mumbled my name through his sleep: "Cindy..."
The old me might have melted at that. Might have believed he loved me just as desperately.
Now all I felt was how absurd it was.
……
I knew who his childhood sweetheart was. Vivian Chambers. She was with Ferdinand James now, a senior from my college years.
I'd met Vivian before. Jacob had mentioned her to me, but all he ever said was that they were close friends.
As for Ferdinand, he had confessed his feelings to me once, but I barely knew him, so I turned him down.
When I later found out Vivian and Ferdinand were together, I assumed it was coincidence. I even wished them well, sincerely.
Now I understood it was never coincidence. It was a game Jacob had engineered from the start, and I was just an expendable NPC in it.
I took a deep breath and kept scrolling through the post. It was a detailed chronicle of every memory he had of loving Vivian in secret.
"I knew I loved her from the time I was ten. But she never once looked at me that way."
"Of course I didn't want to see her with someone else. But I couldn't stand watching her hurt even more, so I chose to let her go."
"When she got rejected and locked herself in her room crying for three days, the hatred I felt was unbearable. I hated that the person she loved wasn't me. I hated that someone as good as her had to suffer that kind of rejection."
"But the person I hated most was my current girlfriend — for so effortlessly taking away everything she wanted."
"So I decided to help her. I went after my current girlfriend, and the plan was to break up a year later."
Only now did I understand why his eyes always carried something I could never read when he looked at me.
But he'd been so good to me. So impossibly good that I never had a single reason to doubt him.
Our one-year anniversary was a week away. I'd been happily planning how to celebrate it, how to make the day special.
I thought I'd surprise him. I thought it would make him happy.
It never occurred to me that all of it was a lie from the very beginning. A scheme. Something closer to revenge.
The comment section was full of reactions.
"Have some shame. How do you even have the nerve to post this?"
"What did your girlfriend ever do to deserve a piece of trash like you? Leave her alone."
Others saw it differently.
"He didn't cheat on her, didn't mistreat her. What's so terrible about that?"
"Am I the only one wondering — if he loved his sweetheart for so many years and never made a move, how come his girlfriend was so easy to win over?"
Jacob had replied to that comment: "With the person you love, you can only tread carefully. You're terrified of saying the wrong thing. You can't bring yourself to hurt her."
"But with my girlfriend, it was just a game of calculated affection points. Throw in a few special tactics when needed, and of course it was easy."
