Chapter 1: The Betrayal in Room 302
The door swung open too easily, the lock Nikki had complained about for months finally giving up. The muffled bass of the gala’s music bled into the hallway for a second before she pushed inside and let the door thud shut behind her.
Her fingers still tingled from the cold outside. She’d left early, a headache pulsing behind her eyes, craving the quiet of her own room and the lavender scent of her pillow. The silence that greeted her was wrong. Thick. It smelled like sweat and something sweet, like Spencer’s vanilla perfume.
Then she saw the blazer.
It was Harry’s fraternity blazer, the one she’d secretly loved because it smelled like his cologne and fabric softener. It was a heap of navy wool on the floor, tangled in a streak of honey-blonde hair that was definitely not her own. One silver button glinted in the faint light from the desk lamp.
Her brain refused to assemble the pieces. It just presented them, separate and horrifying. The blazer. The hair. The shape in her bed.
Harry’s head snapped up from the pillow. His chestnut hair was a wreck. His green eyes, usually so warm, were wide-open portals to pure, undisguised horror. “Nikki.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a confession.
From the other side of the bed, Spencer propped herself up on an elbow. The sheets were twisted around her. A soft, almost soundless laugh escaped her lips. It wasn’t a happy sound. It was a click of a lock turning.
Nikki’s world didn’t shatter. It vaporized. There was no sound, no feeling in her limbs. The framed photo of her and Harry from Fall Formal, laughing with leaves in their hair, seemed to buzz on her dresser. The half-packed suitcase for her weekend trip home lay open by the closet, a formal blazer of her own spilling out. Everything in the room was suddenly a relic from a life that had ended thirty seconds ago.
“Get out.” The words came out flat. Lifeless.
“Nikki, please—” Harry was scrambling, the sheets clinging to him. His movements were frantic, clumsy. “It’s not—it was a mistake. A huge, fucked-up, one-time mistake.”
Spencer slid out of the bed, coolly gathering her clothes. She didn’t look at Nikki. She looked at Harry, her pale blue eyes assessing his panic like it was a mildly interesting specimen. “You should go,” she said to him, her voice quiet. “Let her process.”
“Process?” Nikki’s voice found a register then, sharp and brittle. “You’re in my bed. You’re telling my boyfriend to let me process?” The word ‘boyfriend’ tasted like ash.
Harry was on his feet now, pulling on his boxers, his hands shaking. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I had too much to drink at the gala, and she said she had a headache too, and we came back to get aspirin, and I just… I fucked up. I’m disgusting. I know.” He was crying, actual tears cutting through the guilt on his face.
Nikki stared at him. The hopeless romantic. The one who’d written her poems. The one who’d cried during a stupid rom-com. Now he was just a half-naked boy weeping in the wreckage of something he’d broken.
Spencer dressed with efficient, silent motions. She finally met Nikki’s gaze as she slipped on her shoes. There was no apology there. Just a chilly defiance. A hint of a challenge. Like she’d taken something and wasn’t sure Nikki was strong enough to try and take it back.
“You’re dead to me,” Nikki said to her, the words leaving her lips like stones. “You don’t look at me, you don’t speak to me. You’re air.”
Spencer’s deceptively sweet smile finally faltered, just at the edges. She gave a barely perceptible nod and walked out, closing the door with a soft, final click.
Then it was just them. The silence rushed back in, polluted now.
Harry took a step toward her. “Please. Talk to me. Yell at me. Hit me. Anything.”
“Don’t touch me.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Just get your things and leave.”
He dressed in jerky movements, his apologies coming in a desperate, whispered stream. Promises to fix it, to do anything, to be better. They were just sounds. They meant less than the hum of the mini-fridge.
When he was finally at the door, blazer in hand but looking lost, he paused. “I love you. You have to know that. This meant nothing.”
“It meant everything,” she said, her eyes fixed on the twisted sheets on her bed. “Now get out.”
The door closed. The lock didn’t catch.
Nikki didn’t move for a long time. She breathed in the contaminated air. She looked at the suitcase, at the photo, at the life she’d been packing just hours ago. A numbness settled deep into her bones, a protective layer of permafrost.
She moved mechanically. She stripped the bed, bundling the sheets and comforter into a giant, suffocating ball. She hauled it down the hall to the laundry room and shoved it into a machine, dumping in too much detergent. The act was violent, cathartic.
Back in the room, she opened the window. The cold night air poured in, scouring the space. She started packing again, but not for a weekend home. She pulled bigger sweaters from her drawers, her textbooks, her good makeup. She was leaving this room, this hall, this entire side of campus.
Under a pile of socks, she found it. A cream-colored envelope with her name written in Harry’s looping script. Nikki. It must have been slid under the door earlier. A pre-betrayal note. A love letter, probably. Some grand romantic gesture.
She picked it up. She didn’t open it. She walked to the window, held it over the void for a three-count, her fingers cold and stiff.
She didn’t let go.
She brought it back in and dropped it on the desk, unopened. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was evidence.
The frigid air swirled around her, mixing with the fading scent of vanilla and regret. She zipped the suitcase closed. The sound was definitive. But her eyes drifted back to the envelope, a silent, unanswered question in the sterile glow of the desk lamp.
Outside, a shadow crossed the path below her window. It was Harry, standing under a streetlamp, looking up, hands shoved deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold. Waiting. Always waiting for a forgiveness that hadn’t come.
She switched off the light and let the darkness swallow them both.
She switched off the light and let the darkness swallow them both.
For five full minutes, she stood statue-still at the window, watching his shadowy figure below. He didn’t move. He was a monument to his own fucking regret. The numbness began to crack, a hairline fracture starting deep in her chest, and through it seeped a hot, tar-black rage.
It started with a tremor in her hands.
Then it erupted.
She whirled from the window. Her eyes scanned the room, the familiar details now enemy lines. The photo from Fall Formal. She snatched it up. Their laughing faces blurred as she hurled it across the room. It didn’t shatter satisfyingly against the wall; it thudded, the glass cracking in a spiderweb over their joy, and fell to the floor with a dull slap.
A sob tore from her throat, raw and ugly. She hated it. She hated the sound of her own pain.
She threw things.
The little potted succulent he’d given her for her birthday sailed like a green comet and exploded in a shower of dirt and ceramic against the closet door. The fraternity letters—the stupid, proud Greek letters she’d worn on a sweater—she clawed them off the fabric and flung them. They skittered under the bed.
She grabbed the half-empty coffee cup from her desk. Cold, gritty dregs sloshed over her wrist as she launched it. This time the sound was better. A wet, ceramic smash.
Something inside her was breaking furniture, tearing down curtains. But her body was methodical, precise in its violence. Each item was chosen. Each had a memory. The sweatshirt he’d left behind. She didn’t throw it; she sank her teeth into the soft cotton at the collar and ripped, a guttural sound ripping from her throat as the fabric tore. She shredded it with her bare hands until it was a rag, then flung the remnants toward the door.
The rage was a cleaner feeling than the grief. The grief was a void. This was a fire.
She stumbled to the desk, breathing in ragged gasps. The envelope. His fucking note. Her fingers closed around it. This she would burn. She’d find a lighter and watch his pretty words turn to black curls and ash.
But she didn’t. She crushed it in her fist, the paper crumpling into a hard ball. She drew her arm back to pitch it through the open window, to join him in the cold.
She stopped.
Her arm dropped to her side. The crushed paper was damp from her sweat. She slowly, carefully, smoothed it out on the desk. She didn’t open it. She just stared at her name. Nikki.
A memory, unbidden, venomous, sliced through the anger.
Not of love. Of the betrayal.
It was a sensory flashback, brutal and explicit. The smell of his cologne and vanilla. The sound of Spencer’s soft, gasped laugh from her own bed—but different, breathier. The visual slammed into her: Harry, his back tense and sheened with sweat, pushing Spencer down into the mattress. His hands, those same hands that had cradled Nikki’s face so gently, were gripping Spencer’s hips, his fingers digging into her pale skin. Spencer’s legs were wrapped around him, her heels digging into the small of his back, pulling him deeper. Harry’s face was buried in Spencer’s neck, a low groan rumbling from his chest—a sound Nikki knew, a sound that had once been for her.
“Fuck,” Harry had breathed, the word muffled against Spencer’s skin. “Fuck, Spencer.”
“You feel so good,” Spencer had whispered back, her voice a slippery, triumphant purr. “So much better. Don’t stop.”
And he hadn’t. He’d fucked her. Hard. A frantic, possessive rhythm that shook the bedframe. The headboard had knocked a steady, taunting beat against the wall—the wall to Nikki’s room. He’d come with a choked cry, saying Spencer’s name. Not Nikki’s. Spencer’s.
The memory was a physical blow. Nikki doubled over, dry heaving, bracing herself on the desk. The vivid, filthy truth of it was worse than the discovery. It was a movie she couldn’t turn off.
The rage cooled, hardening into something permanent and jagged inside her ribs.
She straightened up. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The room was a warzone of her own making. Broken things. Scattered things. The past, in pieces on the linoleum.
She picked up her suitcase. She looked once more at the smoothed-out letter on the desk. Evidence. A relic.
She left it there. She walked out of the destroyed room, down the quiet hall, past the laundry room where the machine churned viciously. She pushed through the heavy exit doors into the freezing night.
Harry saw her immediately. He rushed forward, his face a mask of hope and agony. “Nikki. God, please.”
She didn’t break stride. She walked past him as if he were a ghost.
“Nikki! Talk to me! Please!” His voice cracked, echoing in the empty quad.
She kept walking, the wheels of her suitcase rattling a steady, final rhythm on the pavement. The cold air burned her lungs, but it was clean. It carried no vanilla, no cologne, no lies.
She didn’t look back. She turned the corner, and he was gone. Only the echo of his pleading remained, hanging in the dark before dissolving into nothing.
Only the echo of his pleading remained, hanging in the dark before dissolving into nothing.
He stood there until he couldn’t feel his feet. The light in her window stayed off. The finality of it was a physical weight on his chest, making it hard to breathe. He walked, aimlessly, the cold doing nothing to numb the frantic, scrabbling panic inside him.
He went back to the frat house. It was loud, a thumping bassline and the shrieks of late-night partying shaking the old bricks. He avoided the common rooms, the brothers, the questions. He went straight to the bottle of cheap whiskey on his dresser. He drank it like water, welcoming the corrosive burn down his throat. It didn’t clean anything. It just made the images brighter, more torturously detailed.
Spencer’s face beneath him. The eager way she’d opened her mouth to his. The feel of her, so devastatingly different from Nikki. Tighter. Willing in a desperate, clawing way that had felt like validation in his drunk, stupid heart. He’d fucked her wanting to feel powerful, wanted, and all he’d done was annihilate the only thing that ever truly made him feel those things.
The bottle was half empty when the texts started buzzing in his pocket.
Spencer: You okay?
Spencer: That was intense.
Spencer: My room is quiet. If you need to talk.
He stared at the glowing screen. Her words were like a hook, set deep in his guilt. Talk. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to scream. He wanted to rewrite the last three hours. He took another long pull, the room tilting pleasantly, the sharp edges of his horror softening into a blurry, throbbing shame.
He didn’t remember deciding to go. His body just moved. He was off the bed, stumbling, catching himself on the doorframe. The hallway lurched. He fumbled with the front door, the night air hitting him like a wet sheet.
HARRY RETURNS DRUNK.
He navigated by memory, by the haunting pull of the disaster. He didn’t go to Nikki’s hall. That was a tomb now. He went to Spencer’s. The new dorm, the nicer one. His knuckles rapped on the wood, uneven and too loud.
She opened it quickly, as if she’d been waiting. She wore soft, grey lounge shorts and a thin tank top. No makeup. She looked smaller. Her honey-blonde hair was down.
“Harry,” she said, her voice low. She smelled like toothpaste and that vanilla lotion.
He pushed past her into the room. It was neat, impersonal. A scent diffuser hummed on the desk. “You texted,” he slurred.
“I was worried about you.” She closed the door, locking it. The click was final.
He turned on her, the alcohol boiling his blood. “Worried? You’re worried?” A harsh laugh escaped him. “You knew. You knew she’d come back.”
Spencer didn’t flinch. She looked up at him, her pale blue eyes calm. “I didn’t plan it, Harry. It just happened. We’re both adults.” She took a step closer. “She was never going to understand you like I do. She puts you on a pedestal. I see you. The real you.”
Her words were a poison, and he was parched. He grabbed her shoulders, his fingers digging in. “What the fuck does that mean? The real me? The real me is a piece of shit who just destroyed the best thing in his life.”
“Maybe the best thing was an illusion,” she whispered, her hands coming up to rest on his chest. “Maybe the real thing is messier. Maybe it’s this.”
She leaned in and kissed him. It wasn’t sweet. It was a claim. Her tongue was in his mouth, tasting of whiskey and mint. He wanted to shove her away. He wanted to crawl out of his own skin.
But the drunk, shattered part of him responded. A dark, angry heat surged up, bypassing his brain entirely. This was the consequence. This was the bed he’d made. He might as well fucking lie in it.
He kissed her back, a savage, punishing kiss. His hands left her shoulders and fumbled with the hem of her tank top. He yanked it up and over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts were small, tipped with pale pink. He squeezed one, hard, and she gasped into his mouth, not in pain but in triumph.
“Yes,” she hissed. “Don’t be gentle. I don’t want gentle.”
He pushed her backward toward the bed. She fell onto it, bouncing once, and looked up at him with a wild, hungry expression. He tore at his own clothes, his fingers clumsy on his belt buckle. He got his jeans and boxers down around his thighs, his cock already hard, a traitorous, throbbing thing fueled by rage and self-loathing.
He didn’t touch her. He didn’t prepare her. He just climbed on top of her, shoved her shorts and underwear to the side, and drove himself into her in one brutal, unyielding thrust.
She cried out, a sharp, ragged sound. She was dry, tight, almost painfully so. He didn’t care. He buried himself to the hilt, the physical shock of it clearing his head for a second. He looked down at her face, expecting to see pain, regret.
He saw victory.
Her legs locked around his hips, pulling him deeper. “Fuck me,” she demanded, her voice a scrape. “Fuck me like you hate me. Fuck me like she’s watching.”
A growl ripped from his throat. He obeyed. He set a punishing rhythm, slamming into her, the bedframe hammering against the wall. Each thrust was a word. Sorry. Nikki. Sorry. Nikki. Sorry. The cheap headboard rattled like teeth chattering. Sweat dripped from his brow onto her chest.
She met him thrust for thrust, her hips arching, her nails raking down his back. “You’re mine now,” she panted, her breath hot against his ear. “She’ll never take you back. You’re too dirty for her. You belong in this. With me.”
He wanted to make her shut up. He wanted to fuck the words back down her throat. He hooked a hand under her knee, roughly hiking her leg higher, changing the angle, pounding into her with a focused, vicious intensity. Her moans became sharper, less controlled.
“Say it,” she begged, her eyes glazed. “Say you want this. Say you want me.”
He couldn’t. His throat was closed. He just fucked her, his body a piston of pure punishment. The pleasure was there, a dark, shameful coil tightening in his gut, but it was inextricably tangled with the image of Nikki’s frozen face in the doorway. He was fucking Spencer, but he was destroying himself. The two acts had become the same thing.
His climax built, a wave of nausea and electric release. He tried to pull out. Spencer’s heels dug into his ass, holding him tight.
“Don’t you dare,” she snarled.
He came inside her with a choked, ragged sound that was almost a sob, spilling himself into the wreckage. The pulses felt like accusations.
He collapsed on top of her, the smell of sex and sweat and vanilla clogging his senses. His mind was a blank, buzzing static. The whiskey churned in his stomach.
She stroked his damp hair. “See?” she murmured, her voice smug and soft. “This is real.”
He rolled off her, onto his back, staring at the blank ceiling. The reality of what he’d just done—again—seeped into him, cold and definitive. He’d taken the fracture and turned it into a canyon. He’d used her body like a weapon against himself, and she’d loved it.
He was drunk. He was empty. And he was, without a doubt, utterly fucked.
And he was, without a doubt, utterly fucked.
The ceiling tiles were a smudged, endless white. Spencer’s breathing evened out beside him, a satisfied little sigh escaping her lips. Harry waited for the regret to fully drown him. Instead, a colder, quieter feeling settled in his bones: resignation. This was him now. This was the bed. He would lie in it until the springs rusted.
He shoved himself up, the motion harsh. His clothes were a tangled heap on the floor. He dressed in silence, his back to her, every rustle of fabric unbearably loud.
“You’re leaving?” Her voice was soft, but it wasn’t hurt. It was a probe.
“Yeah.” He didn’t offer more. He found his shoes.
“It’s almost three,” she said. She sat up, the sheet pooling at her waist. “You can stay. It’s not like she’s waiting for you.”
He flinched. The pronoun was a scalpel. She. “I need air.”
He didn’t look at her as he left. The hallway was a sterile, fluorescent tunnel. His own footsteps echoed, chasing him. He didn’t go back to the frat house. He walked, the frigid air scraping his lungs clean of her vanilla scent. He walked until he found himself standing on the crunchy, frozen grass of the quad, staring up at the dark window of Nikki’s dorm.
It was still dark. Empty.
He pulled out his phone. His thumb hovered over her name. He typed a message, deleted it. Typed another. Deleted it. The screen glowed, a pathetic beacon in the dark. Finally, he settled on four words. The only true ones he had left.
Harry: I don’t deserve you.
He sent it. The whoosh sound was like a door sealing shut. He didn’t expect a reply. He didn’t get one.
Nikki didn’t go home. Home was four hours away and full of questions she couldn’t answer. She went to Liam’s apartment.
Liam was Cameron’s older brother, a grad student who lived off-campus in a messy, book-filled studio that always smelled like stale coffee and weed. He was the emergency contact for disasters the college health center couldn’t fix. She pounded on his door at 2:47 AM.
He opened it, bleary-eyed, his glasses crooked. One look at her face—the tear-streaked makeup, the violent hollows under her eyes—and he stepped back silently, letting her in.
She didn’t speak. She walked to his worn-out sofa, sat down, and stared at the brick wall.
Liam put the kettle on. He brought her a blanket. He sat in the armchair opposite and waited.
“Harry,” she finally said, the name a piece of glass in her throat. “And Spencer.”
Liam closed his eyes, a slow blink of comprehension and anger. “Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” She pulled the blanket tighter. “I want to not feel anything.”
Liam nodded. He got up, went to a small wooden box on his bookshelf, and pulled out a neatly rolled joint. “This’ll help with the feeling nothing part. It won’t help with the thinking part, though. That shit’s on you.”
He lit it, took a drag, and passed it to her. Nikki hadn’t smoked since freshman year, but she took it without hesitation. The smoke hit her lungs, harsh and expanding. She held it, letting the burn distract her, then exhaled slowly. A fuzzy static began to seep into the sharp edges of her mind.
They passed it back and forth in silence. The room grew hazy. The weight on her chest became a distant, muffled thing.
“I keep seeing it,” she murmured, her tongue feeling thick. “In my head. Like a movie. His hands on her. The sounds.”
“That’s the trauma,” Liam said, his voice calm and clinical. “Your brain trying to make sense of the unacceptable by replaying it. It’s a bastard.”
“I want to scratch my own brain out.”
“Valid.” He took the last drag and put the roach out. “But messy. You’d ruin a perfectly good blanket.”
A choked sound escaped her—half sob, half laugh. It felt strange in her chest.
The weed did its work. The volcanic rage cooled into a heavy, lethargic ache. The images in her head became slower, less vivid, like a bad TV signal. She slumped into the couch cushions.
“Can I stay here?”
“Couch is yours. You know where the clean-ish towels are.” He stood, stretching. “Nikki?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s an idiot. And she’s a venomous little spider. This is about their emptiness, not your worth. Remember that when the sun comes up and it all feels real again.”
He disappeared into his tiny bathroom. Nikki listened to the water run. She felt untethered, floating in the dim room. She pulled out her phone. A notifications screen filled with messages from the group chat—Where’d you go? The gala was lame anyway!—and one lone text from Harry.
I don’t deserve you.
She stared at it. The numbness allowed her to see it for what it was: not an apology, but a confession. A surrender. He was agreeing with her. He was naming himself what she now knew him to be: undeserving.
She didn’t block his number. She simply put her phone face down on the floor. She wanted him to see the read receipt. She wanted him to know she’d seen his admission and found it lacking. A judgment in silence.
Sleep came, a black and dreamless pit.
The sun was a brutal, accusing thing. It sliced through Liam’s bare windows, landing directly on Nikki’s face. She woke with a dry mouth, a fuzzy head, and the memory descending on her like a falling anvil.
Harry. Spencer. The bed. The sounds.
It was all there, fresh-coated in the morning light. The weed had only postponed the trial.
Her phone buzzed on the floor. She grabbed it. A local number she didn’t recognize. She swiped to answer, her voice a croak. “Hello?”
“Nikki? It’s me.” Harry’s voice was ragged, shot through with a desperate hope. “I’m outside your dorm. I’ve got your latte. Oat milk, two pumps of vanilla, just like you like. Please. Just come to the window. Just let me see you.”
He was there. At her empty room. Performing his penance.
A hot, new fury ignited in her gut, clean and sharp. “I’m not there, Harry.”
A pause. “Where are you? Are you okay? Talk to me, please. I’ll come to you.”
“No.” The word was final. “You don’t get to perform the worried boyfriend. The script is torn up. You lost your part.”
“Nikki, I’ll do anything—”
“You already did everything,” she cut him off, her voice cold and steady. “You fucked my roommate in my bed. There’s nothing left to do. Stop calling me.”
She ended the call. She immediately blocked the new number. She lay on the couch, breathing hard, the fury curdling into something purposeless. She needed to move. To prove she was still alive in this new, ruined landscape.
She got up, used Liam’s shower, scrubbing her skin until it was pink. She put on yesterday’s clothes, the fabric smelling like smoke and despair. Liam was gone, a note on the counter: Coffee’s made. Help yourself to anything. Text if you need backup.
She drank black coffee, her hands steadying as the caffeine hit. She needed her things. She needed to officially move out. The thought of stepping back into that room made her nauseous, but leaving her life in there felt like surrender.
She walked back to campus. The daylight felt exposing. Every couple holding hands was a personal insult. Every laugh from a window felt like mockery.
She used her key, her heart a hammer in her throat. The door opened.
The room was as she’d left it—destroyed. The shattered picture, the dirt from the plant, the torn sweatshirt. It was a museum of her rage. And there, on the desk, was the cream-colored envelope.
She ignored it. She focused on packing with a military efficiency. She emptied drawers into suitcases and garbage bags. She took only what was necessary, what was purely hers. Anything that smelled like him, held a memory of them, was left behind. The fraternity sweater. The ticket stubs from their first concert. A stupid, cheap necklace he’d won for her at a fair.
She was stuffing a bag with textbooks when the door opened.
Spencer stood there, holding a cardboard box. She had the audacity to look fresh, dressed in athleisure wear, her hair in a high ponytail. She glanced at the wreckage, her expression unreadable.
“I came for the rest of my things,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “From before.”
Nikki straightened up. She felt a strange calm descend. “Get it and get out.”
Spencer moved to the closet, pulling out a few forgotten sweaters, a hair dryer. She placed them in the box. She didn’t hurry. The air in the room was charged, thick with everything unsaid.
“You’ll never forgive him, you know,” Spencer said without looking at her. She was folding a sweater with meticulous care. “And he’ll never forgive himself. You’ve ruined him. Congratulations.”
Nikki laughed. The sound was so bitter it startled them both. “I ruined him? You spread your legs and you think you won some prize? He’s not a trophy, Spencer. He’s a liar. And you’re just the thing he used to prove it to me. You’re a fact. A disgusting fact.”
Spencer’s composure cracked. A flush crept up her neck. “He came to my room last night. After. Did he tell you that?”
The calm in Nikki shattered. The image—Harry leaving her destroyed room and going straight to Spencer—was a depth of betrayal she hadn’t even fathomed.
Spencer saw it hit home. A small, vicious smile played on her lips. “He fucked me again. Harder. Angrier. He said my name when he came. It’s over, Nikki. It’s so over it’s rotting.”
Nikki moved. There was no thought. Just a red wave. She crossed the space and slapped Spencer across the face. The crack was satisfying, a punctuation mark.
Spencer’s head snapped to the side. She touched her cheek, her eyes wide with shock, then glinting with a perverse delight. “Feel better?”
“Get out,” Nikki whispered, her hand stinging. “Before I do something you’ll need a surgeon to fix.”
Spencer picked up her box. She paused at the door. “You had everything. You never even saw me. Now you see me.”
She left.
Nikki stood in the center of the destruction, trembling. The hollow feeling was back, bigger now. It had room for Harry’ first betrayal, and now for this second, colder one. He’d gone back. He’d chosen the evidence over the apology.
She finished packing in a blind frenzy. She dragged her bags out into the hall, down the stairs, stacking them by