Chapter 83
(Callum)
By the time I left campus that evening, I already knew I had made another mistake.
Not because of anything dramatic.
Nothing dramatic had happened.
Clara and I had sat on a bench, talked about her father, talked about Emma, and spent nearly an hour having the kind of normal conversation that should have existed between us from the beginning.
That was the problem.
It felt normal.
Dangerously normal.
Every instinct I possessed told me that spending more time with Clara should have made things easier to resist.
Instead, the opposite kept happening.
The more I learned about her, the harder it became to maintain distance.
The more she learned about me, the more impossible pretending became.
By the time I reached my apartment, I felt emotionally exhausted.
Not b
