The deal was dead. The fake was over. We were real – publicly, privately, no asterisk, no arrangement, no fine print. Just two people who'd chosen each other through scholarship threats and family fractures and a word on a whiteboard and every other thing the world had thrown at us.
I should have been relieved. And I was – for about five minutes. Then the real relationship started and I discovered something nobody warns you about: the fake version was easier. The fake version had rules. The real version had Rhys.
It started small. The location check I noticed two weeks ago – my phone screen glowing with the "Rhys viewed your location" notification while I was at the library. I dismissed it. He'd been through hell. People had tried to tear us apart with fabricated pregnancies and anonymou
