Chapter 3

I didn't go straight home.

In the garage, I sat in my car with the engine off and checked my phone. Grandpa had called twice. I sent him a message saying I was on my way.

Then I changed the passcode.

Lydia knew the old one. I'd given it to her in a library when her battery died and she needed to call a classmate. After that, it had seemed petty to start hiding my screen.

There were so many things I'd once considered petty.

We'd met in the first year of our master's program at Westbridge University. I was twenty-three then, back in school after a year working and helping with Grandpa's health problems. Lydia had a scholarship and two part-time jobs.

At lunch, she bought the cheapest things on the menu. I started ordering too much and asking her to help me finish it. At the time, I'd thought I was sparing her pride.

Maybe I should have asked what she wanted. That was a mistake I could own. It wasn't the same as deserving what she did afterward.

Over winter break, she told me she had nowhere to go. I brought her home.

She learned how Grandpa liked his coffee and which evenings Daniel came for dinner. She got up before the cook and stayed in the kitchen until somebody praised her for helping. I thought she was trying to feel useful in an unfamiliar place.

Then a pendant Daniel had given me disappeared.

I found it broken in the kitchen. Lydia was the only person I'd told where I kept it, the only person I'd admitted my feelings to. When I confronted her, she said it had been an accident.

I asked her to leave.

She made it as far as the front steps before Daniel arrived. Barefoot and crying in the cold, she told him she had no one else.

He took her side without asking why I'd been angry.

Later, when I tried to explain, he said, “You think everything has a price. Some of us care about actual people.”

They became a couple. She sent me photographs until I learned to leave her messages unopened.

That history had already happened. I couldn't get back to the moment before I'd trusted either of them. But I could keep them from getting another year.

I opened the security page on my email account and signed out every device I didn't recognize. I changed the password for the university portal too.

I didn't delete Lydia's messages. I saved them somewhere she couldn't reach.

In my first life, I'd spent too much time trying to explain myself after evidence had vanished. This time, I didn't need to know what she'd do next to stop handing her the tools.

Before I left the garage, I went back to the lobby.

The concierge was at her desk again.

“Could you ask management to preserve tonight's entry footage?” I said. “From when I arrived until now. There may be a complaint later.”

She didn't offer to give it to me. She wrote down my name and the time and said she'd pass the request along.

It was enough to start.

When I returned to the car, my phone lit with a message from Lydia.

*He's fine. He wants me to stay. You can stop worrying about him.*

I read it twice.

Then I saved that one too.