He Chose Her, I Left Him For Good

Chapter 4

The day I arrived in Cloudwater City, news that Dashiell had run eight red lights in a row and got his license revoked blew up on the trending charts.

My mom called me up, furious about me ditching the wedding. "How can you be so reckless with our family's reputation? Dashiell grew up with you, for heaven's sake... you even saved his life once! How could you just up and leave?"

I forced down the bitter, heavy lump in my throat and asked, "Between us, does that life-saving favor even count anymore?"

My mom went silent for a beat. Then she snapped even louder, "So what if Lila took credit for what you did? What's the point of holding a grudge over it this long?"

Back after we finished the college entrance exam, Dashiell and I had planned a trip together. We never expected to run into Lila along the way.

Back then, his whole world revolved around me. But Lila messed up behind the wheel, and we crashed hard.

Dashiel threw himself over me to shield me, using his own body as a human cushion. He got pinned tight between the seats and blacked out instantly. Lila had ducked out of the way just in time, so she barely had a scratch on her.

I summoned every last ounce of strength I had to drag Dashiel out of the wreckage and get us to safety. Then my body gave out completely, and I blacked out right there.

When I came back again, I was lying in a hospital bed.

Dashiell told me that maybe we'd been unfair to Lila this whole time. "She dragged both of us out of that wreck and got us to safety, Eulalie. She even cut her own wrist to feed us her blood just to keep us alive. There's no way she's a bad person."

I stared at the soft, adoring look in his eyes, then glanced down at the cuts on my own wrist, and thought about how much cutting it must have hurt. I opened my mouth to set the record straight, but my parents rushed in and cut me off before I could say a word.

Just like that, Lila got all the credit for saving both our lives.

And from that day on, Dashiell's feelings for her shifted, little by little, until they were nothing like what they used to be.

All those old incidents had definitely led us to where we were now, but what was the point of hashing them out anymore? Who could even untangle that mess now?

I hung up the call, stared at the flood of texts Dashiell kept spamming my phone with, and sighed. I snapped my SIM card in half and tossed the pieces straight into the trash.

Life in Cloudwater City wasn't exactly what I'd pictured, but I knew I could get used to it... get used to living without Dashiell.

At least, that's what I told myself. Until the day I got home and found Dashiell planted right outside my front door.

He looked far thinner than before, ragged and completely disheveled. The second his eyes landed on me, they reddened, brimming with unshed tears. "Eulalie… look, the dress. I changed it back." He held out the gown Lila had worn to me, offering it like a fragile, earnest peace offering. I just turned my head away, refusing to let it come anywhere near me.

"Dashiell, you and I both know the dress isn’t the problem here." I held his gaze.

A tear rolled down his cheek, and his voice cracked when he spoke. "But we’ve been together for years! You’re just going to throw all that history out the window? Eulalei we worked our way up from that tiny county all the way to Paris together..."

I sighed, cutting him off mid-sentence. "But what did you do, Dashiell?"

A long, heavy silence hung in the air, until it was shattered by the loud, shrill buzz of his phone cutting through the quiet. He hit decline, but it started ringing again immediately. I glanced at the caller ID... it was Lila.

"Answer it," I said.

That annoyingly sweet, wide-eyed, innocent voice of LIla’s drifted through the speaker the second he picked up. "Dashiell, I think Eulalie might be pregnant… I found lactation shots at home. The doctor said only breastfeeding women use those, or... well, you know. I already have spontaneous milk leakage, so I don’t need those shots. That means they have to be Eulalie. She wouldn’t… have broken up with you for that, right, Dashiell?"