Chapter 161 HARPER

Chapter 161 HARPER
I was crying in front of the mirror again.

I stared at my own reflection for a long moment, at the mascara threatening to ruin the makeup I'd spent forty minutes on, and then I let out a short, wet laugh and wiped under my eyes with the back of my hand. "Isn't this what you wanted?" I said to myself out loud. "You broke up with him. You did that."

And I had. I'd been the one to end it, standing in the middle of that arena with confetti still falling and the crowd still celebrating, telling Tyler Mercer that we should break up. I'd done it so it would be easier. So that by the time I boarded a plane to London I'd already be used to the absence of him, already be partway through the grieving, instead of starting it at the departure gate.

What I hadn't accounted for was how thoroughly he would respect my decision.

He hadn't fought it. He hadn't shown up at my door, hadn't texted me in the middle of the night, hadn't pulled me aside in the hallway between exams to tell me I was making a mistake. He'd just quietly removed himself from my daily life the way I'd essentially asked him to, and somehow that hurt more than anything else he could have done. At least if he'd argued back I would have had something to hold onto. Instead I got glimpses of him across classrooms and corridors, looking composed in a way that made me furious and heartbroken in equal measure.

And now we'd graduated.

It was over. High school, Westfield, all of it. Done.

This wasn't how I'd pictured it ending.

I hadn't gone to the team's celebration party after the championship. I hadn't gone to prom. And Tyler hadn't gone either, at least not according to any of the photos posted, and I hated myself a little for how much I'd checked. I hated myself more for the small, shameful comfort I took from knowing he hadn't gone without me.

"Stop it," I told my reflection. "Tyler deserves to be happy. With or without you. And you're going to tell him that today."

I meant it. I'd decided somewhere between packing my room and losing the ability to eat properly that I was going to find him at the ceremony and say it to his face. Not to reopen anything, but just because he deserved to hear it. And I needed to say it before I got on a plane and turned into someone who never did.

"Harper?" Claire's voice drifted down the hall. "Are you almost ready, sweetheart?"

"Coming," I called back, keeping my voice even. "Just grabbing a few more things."

The moment her footsteps faded I pressed my hands over my face and cried again, quickly and quietly, the kind of crying you do when you only have about ninety seconds before someone comes to check on you.

I felt like two completely different people living in the same body, one trying to be a good daughter, genuinely happy for her dad and Claire and the life they were building, and one falling apart at the seams over a boy in a graduation gown.

I wiped my face, fixed my makeup for the second time, and picked up my bag.

Then I turned and looked at the room.

My bed was stripped. The shelves were bare. Every piece of me had been packed into boxes or luggage, and the room just looked like a room now, like it had forgotten who lived there. I thought about Tyler climbing through the window late at night, the way he'd always been careful about the creaky floorboard near the door. The way he slept with one arm thrown over me like he was keeping me from going somewhere.

My bag slipped from my fingers.

I sat down on the floor and cried properly this time, with my back against the bed frame and my knees pulled up, until Claire called my name a second time and I had to pull myself together and go downstairs.


The ceremony was held on the school grounds, rows of gold chiavari chairs arranged across the lawn, the sun out for once like it had been specifically requested. I sat with the rest of my class in my cap and gown and watched the proceedings with the particular numbness of someone who had already emotionally left the building.

When they called my name as valedictorian, I walked up, shook hands, accepted the award, smiled for the photograph, and turned to go back down the steps.

Then they called Tyler's name for salutatorian.

I stopped.

He came up the steps and across the stage and I don't know what made me do it but I turned back around and waited.

He looked good, which was deeply unfair. His graduation gown was blue and white like everyone else's but underneath it he was dressed entirely in black, a dark shirt with the tie loosened, his golden curls escaping from under his cap at every angle. He looked like someone who had decided at the last minute to show up and hadn't bothered to pretend otherwise. It shouldn't have worked as well as it did.

He reached me and I stretched out my hand.

"Congratulations," I said.

He looked down at my hand. There was a pause, a long one, where I could see him weighing something behind his eyes. Then something shifted in his expression, something that looked uncomfortably close to anger, and he walked past me without taking it.

I stood there for a second with my hand still out.

Then I dropped it, turned around, and walked off the stage. I didn't look for anyone after that. I went straight to my dad, who was standing near the back with Claire, and I touched his arm. "I'm ready to go."

He blinked. "Already? We've still got an hour and a half before the flight. Don't you want to say goodbye to your friends, maybe stay for a bit after the ceremony?"

"I'd rather wait at the airport," I said.

He looked at me for a moment and then nodded, the way parents do when they can see something is wrong but know better than to push it right now.

We walked to the car. I didn't look back at the ceremony, at the clusters of people hugging and taking photos and crying the happy kind of tears. I kept my eyes forward and got in and stared out the window as we pulled away.

At the very edge of my vision, just before we turned out of the school gates, I saw him. Tyler, standing at a distance, watching our car leave. I turned and looked at the other side of the road until he was gone.

The airport was a blur.

I moved through check-in and security and passport control the way you do when your body knows what it's supposed to do but your mind has completely checked out. I followed my dad, answered when spoken to, sat where I was told to sit. The terminal hummed around me with the particular noise of people going places, and I sat with my hands in my lap and felt absolutely nothing.

Then they called our flight.

And something cracked open.

It hit me all at once, standing up from that seat, the weight of what I was actually doing. I was getting on a plane. I was leaving. I hadn't said goodbye to my mom or Megan or Mark or anyone, and I'd done it deliberately out of some twisted self-protective instinct that now, in this moment, felt like the worst decision I'd ever made. My throat tightened. My feet slowed.

"Harper?" My dad turned back.

"Coming," I said, but I didn't move.

Then I heard my name.

Not calmly. Not from nearby. Someone was shouting it from across the terminal, loud enough to turn heads, cutting through the ambient noise of announcements and rolling luggage and a hundred separate conversations. I turned around.

Tyler was moving through the crowd at full speed, excusing himself past people, his graduation cap somehow still on his head and his gown half falling off one shoulder, and before I could take a single step toward him he reached me and his mouth was on mine.

I kissed him back immediately, both hands gripping the front of his gown, and somewhere in the middle of it I started crying again.

When we broke apart I pressed my forehead to his. "I thought you wouldn't come," I whispered.

"I couldn't not come." His hands cupped my face, thumbs brushing the tears away. "I couldn't let you leave like that. Harper, listen to me." His voice was urgent, low, just for me. "I know why you broke up with me. I was angry at first, I didn't understand it, especially after I turned down the Chicago offer to follow you to Minnesota."

I pulled back. "What?"

"It doesn't matter," he said, shaking his head. "That's not why I'm here. I'm here because the distance means nothing to me. Whatever it takes, we figure it out. If I have to cancel Minnesota I will. I'm already working out how to pursue hockey and get to you at the same time, but if it ever comes down to choosing, I'm choosing you every time."

"Tyler, no—"

"I'm not doing it for you," he said, holding my face so I had to look at him. "I'm doing it for us. And I'm telling you right now that you getting on that plane today is not the end of our story. I'm coming for you. We finish college, we get an apartment, we travel everywhere we said we would." He paused. "Japan first."

I was shaking, the tears coming faster than I could stop them.

Then he did something I wasn't expecting.

He stepped back slightly and reached into the inside pocket of his gown, and he went down on one knee right there in the middle of the departure terminal with people staring from every direction.

"I know it's soon," he said, looking up at me. "I'm not asking you to marry me today. But I need you to take this with you." He opened the small box in his hand. A simple ring, delicate and beautiful, caught the light. "Think of it as a promise. That this isn't over. That I meant every single word."

I leaned down and kissed him first, and he slipped the ring onto my finger while I was still kissing him.

The flight attendant's voice crackled over the intercom again, final call, and I straightened up and turned toward the gate.

But before I could reach it, a wave hit me from the side.

Megan, her arms around me before I'd even seen her coming, squeezing hard enough to lift me slightly off the ground. Behind her was my mom, eyes wet, pulling me in next. Mark gave me a tight one-armed hug. The rest of the team waved and called out, and Peter stepped forward with that particular grin of his and said something so perfectly timed and ridiculous that a laugh escaped me through the tears, real and completely involuntary.

Tyler reached through the crowd and pulled me back toward him one last time.

"I love you," he said. "More than you know."

I pressed my hand flat against his chest and looked at him, at all of him, trying to memorize every detail.

“I love you more, Tyler Mercer,” I said.

Then I rose onto my toes and kissed him again, deeper this time, like I was trying to stretch the moment out long enough to make it stay.

I didn’t let go until the flight attendant’s voice broke through once more, and even then it took everything in me to finally pull away.

And I walked through the gate.

I found my seat and pressed my face to the window as the plane began to move, watching the terminal building grow smaller. I kept watching until we lifted and the ground disappeared beneath the clouds, until there was nothing left to see but white in every direction.

My chest tightened.

But this time, I didn’t cry. I just looked down at the ring on my finger and let myself hold onto that instead.

✨THE END✨

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