It was true—he had once been the person who knew me best in this world, the one I was closest to.
But so what? No matter how well someone knew you, there always came a day when you drifted apart.
Gerard Sanchez and I met when we were eight years old.
By the time we separated, we had spent sixteen years side by side.
Back then, I was the kid who looked nothing like her adoptive parents—wrong features, wrong skin tone—and had spent a full year being mocked by classmates. Dug out of a dumpster. Crawled out from under a rock. A feral child. That was what they called me.
He was a naive boy raised in a loving home, the kind of kid who fancied himself a hero.
He had a habit of showing up when I didn't need him, planting his hands on his hips like a tiny adult and firing back at every classmate who laughed at me.
I told him more than once that words like those barely registered. Growing up in the orphanage had given me skin thick enough that schoolyard taunts felt like a feather brushing my arm.
But he stubbornly believed I was being threatened and intimidated, too scared to stand up for myself.
So he volunteered to be my protector.
He begged his parents to transfer him into my class. He begged our teacher to seat him next to me. He even threw a full-blown tantrum—screaming, rolling on the floor—until his parents agreed to move to a house closer to mine, all because his old neighborhood wasn't on my route and made it hard to "keep me safe."
His over-the-top antics surprised me, but I knew how children were. They loved new things and grew bored just as fast. The orphanage was full of older kids who'd been returned after the biological children in their adoptive families got tired of them, or simply decided they didn't want a sibling anymore.
I figured once he got bored of hanging around me, he'd find some other friend.
I never expected him to follow me around like a shadow for eleven years.
From elementary school through high school, I went from resenting the intrusion on my solitude to growing used to having him beside me. A girl's feelings have a way of taking root without her noticing.
The year we graduated high school, I asked him a question, keeping my voice light.
If it had been someone else getting picked on back then, would he have had the same harebrained impulse to trail after them like a lost puppy?
He saw right through the smile to the insecurity underneath.
And he caught it, steady as anything.
"It's strange. Ever since I started following you around, I've thought more than once about how ridiculous it would be to just latch onto some random person and play hero. It would make no sense."
"It's like it was meant to be. My whole hero complex existed just so I'd be ready when you came along."
I held on to those words for years and years.
I was still holding on to them even after he started playing hero for someone else.
By my first year of grad school, we had been together for five years. Both sets of parents agreed we would marry after graduation.
Everything was moving along exactly as planned—until our engagement party.
Leila Graves, who had grown up in the same orphanage as me, shattered it all.
She brought the orphanage director with her, armed with fabricated evidence, and announced in front of every single guest that she was the one my adoptive parents had meant to choose.
She was the one Gerard was supposed to protect. The one he was supposed to love.
She claimed that when my parents came to pick a child, I had tricked her into taking sleeping pills so she would miss her chance. We were the only two girls of the right age. With her out of the picture, I became the only option.
And because of that, she said, she had been condemned to a nightmare—a living hell—when she was sixteen.
I assumed everyone could see through it. A pathetic, jealous lie, and a clumsy one at that.
After all, during the years she had pretended to be my friend, she had stabbed me in the back more times than I could count.
When she couldn't scrape together enough from her part-time jobs to cover living expenses, I fought to get her a financial aid grant—wrestled it away from a classmate who came from money but pretended to be poor. Leila turned around and told that classmate I had targeted her on purpose, that I resented anyone with wealth.
When her jobs ate into her study time and finals were approaching, I didn't just organize my notes for her and stay up reviewing with her until three in the morning. To keep her from failing, I even tried to slip her my answers during the exam.
