Early July 2029 cast a soft, golden glow over Montclair, New Jersey, the summer heat clinging to the air, thick with the scent of blooming roses and warm asphalt as I sat in my cramped apartment, my nurse’s scrubs neatly folded on the couch after a grueling twelve-hour hospital shift. The fluorescent lights of the ER, the beeping monitors, and the quiet gratitude of patients still lingered in my mind, but they couldn’t drown out the storm in my chest. Two weeks had passed since the Hamptons vacation, where Justin’s kiss on Montauk’s windswept beach had reignited the spark we’d lost, his I love you echoing our Greenwich past—the auction, Tod’s Point, the Met Gala. The memory of our bathroom hookup at Lila’s Greenwich Academy graduation lingered like a fever: his hands on my waist, my bare n
