Notification: The love I almost lost

Chapter Two: The Other Version

They say the honeymoon phase doesn’t last forever. I just didn’t expect ours to expire so fast.

The first few weeks of the semester were a blur of orientation events, syllabus weeks, and stolen moments between classes, where Sophia and I would grab coffee or sit on the library steps just talking, the way we always had. Except now I noticed something unusual. The conversations that used to stretch for hours online were getting shorter in person. Quieter. Like she was saving her energy for someone or something else.

I told myself I was imagining it. New environment, new stress, new everything. People change when real life hits them. I got that.

But then the little things started piling up.

She stopped replying as fast. A text that would’ve gotten an instant response back when we were just voices on a screen now sat there for hours, sometimes until the next day. When I’d ask if she wanted to grab dinner, she’d say she was “so tired” or “swamped with work,” even on days I knew she didn’t have much going on, because small campus, big rumor mill someone always saw her somewhere.

I remember the night I brought it up for the first time. We were in her dorm room, her lying on her bed scrolling through her phone while I sat on the edge, trying to get her attention.

“You’ve been distant,” I said.

She didn’t even look up. “I’m just adjusting, Liam. College is a lot.”

“You were adjusting for both of us for three months before we even got here,” I said. “This feels different.”

She sighed like I was the problem. Like I was overreacting. “Can we not do this right now?”

That was the first time I felt it-that cold, sinking feeling in my chest, like the ground had shifted just slightly beneath me. The girl who used to text me good morning every single day without failure was now someone I had to convince to look up from her phone.

I told myself it was a phase. I told myself the Sophia I fell for- the warm, attentive, funny girl who remembered the smallest details about my life was still in there somewhere, just buried under the stress of midterms and new-city chaos

I was wrong about that too.

Because somewhere in the middle of all this distance, a name started popping up in her stories, her texts, her half-finished sentences. A guy from her econ class. Charismatic, Loud. The kind of guy who walked into a room and made sure everyone knew he’d arrived.

Jayden.

I didn’t think much of it at first, until I started noticing his name everywhere. Sophia laughing at his jokes in a group chat screenshot she accidentally left open on her laptop. Sophia liking every single one of his i********: posts within minutes of him posting. Sophia mentioning, almost too casually, that “oh yeah, he helped me with my econ homework again.”

Again. Like it was a routine now.

I brought it up once, gently, trying not to sound insecure even though insecurity was eating me alive from the inside. “You’ve been talking about him a lot.”

“He’s just a friend, Liam,” she said, rolling her eyes like the accusation was beneath her. “Do you not trust me?”

And that’s the thing about being gaslit, slowly you don’t even realize it’s happening. Each time I voiced a concern, she’d twist it until I was the one apologizing. Until I was the one who felt crazy for noticing what was right in front of me.

So I stopped saying anything. I told myself I was being paranoid. I told myself the girl who planned a future with me over FaceTime calls at 2 a.m. wouldn’t just throw that away for some guy in her econ class.

I clung to the memories instead. The nights we spent planning our first college Halloween costumes together. The playlist she made me, titled “songs that remind me of you,” that I still listened to on my walks to class. The promise, the one we’d made months before any of this started, about the Freshers party, the one thing I held onto like it still meant something.

“We’re still going together, right?” I asked her one afternoon, trying to sound casual, trying not to let the desperation leak into my voice.

She hesitated. Actually hesitated, like she had to think about it.

“Yeah,” she finally said. “Of course.”

But her eyes didn’t meet mine when she said it. And deep down, in the part of me that already knew the truth before my heart was ready to accept it, I understood that the girl standing in front of me wasn’ t entirely mine anymore.

Valentine’s Day was coming up. And I had this stupid, hopeful idea that maybe, just maybe if I showed up with the right gesture, the right gift, the right amount of effort, I could remind her of who we used to be before New York, before Jayden, before all of this distance crept in between us like a slow, creeping frost.

I had no idea I was about to walk into the worst moment of my life.