Chapter 11 “I Told Myself You’d Be Back by Dawn”
With Nathan privately tutoring her, Chloe somehow managed to shoot to the top of her eighth-grade class, securing her spot in the same highly competitive public magnet school as him.
But the moment the first high school honors list was posted, reality crashed down on her.
“I finally made it to the top, and now I’m at the bottom again.” Chloe groaned, dropping her head onto her desk. “This school is way too hard.”
She turned her head sideways to look at Nathan, who was, as always, sitting comfortably at the very top of the school rankings. She reached out and grabbed his sleeve. “Nathan, I’m taking the exact same classes as you. If you don’t help me, I’m going to fail out!”
“Don’t be dramatic.” Nathan flushed slightly, trying to pull his arm back.
“I mean it! You have to save me a seat next to you in all our required courses,” Chloe instructed hurriedly.
Nathan just glanced at her, said nothing, and hoisted his backpack onto his shoulder.
But the next morning, even though their new school didn’t assign seats based on grades, Nathan arrived twenty minutes early. He scanned the room, chose a desk near the back, and casually draped his jacket over the empty chair right in front of it.
When Chloe finally strolled in just as the bell rang, the classroom was packed.
She panicked for a second, then spotted the empty chair in front of Nathan. She immediately dashed over, threw herself into the seat, and turned around, beaming. “Nathan, you’re amazing! You’re my guardian angel!”
“You’re exaggerating,” Nathan snorted softly, turning his face toward the window.
Now almost fourteen, he was completely used to her dramatic, exaggerated praise. But every single time she said it, a quiet, helpless surge of happiness bloomed in his chest.
A few years later, when it came time to pick their senior year courses, Chloe wanted to take more humanities and arts classes.
Nathan stared at her course sheet, his brow furrowing in deep displeasure. “Didn’t you say we were going to take AP Calculus and Physics together? If you take these, we won’t even be in the same building for most of the day.”
“But AP Physics is too hard,” Chloe whined, slumping forward onto her desk, looking up at him pitifully.
Fifteen-year-old Nathan watched her. His fingers twitched. He had the sudden, overwhelming urge to poke her soft cheek, but he forced himself to hold back. Instead, he reached out and gently tapped her arm with the cap of his pen.
“It’s not hard,” he said, a small smile finally breaking through. “With me here, what are you afraid of?”
Chloe looked at him, seriously weighing her options.
He was right. If they had different schedules, she’d be separated from the smartest guy in the school. Without him basically dragging her across the finish line, she probably couldn’t maintain her GPA.
She bit her lip, then sat up and met his gaze. “Fine. But then you have to take full responsibility for me. If I start failing, you have to tutor me until I catch up. Deal?”
“Fine. I’ll tutor you if I have time,” Nathan replied, propping his chin on his hand, trying to look completely nonchalant.
“No, you have to promise,” Chloe insisted, leaning closer.
“I’m not promising.” Nathan turned his head away to hide his smile.
“If you don’t promise, I’m registering for European History right now!” Chloe tapped her pen stubbornly against the desk, glaring at him.
“Fine. I promise,” Nathan sighed, entirely at her mercy.
“Yay!” Chloe grabbed her course catalogue, violently crossed out the humanities classes, and circled the STEM ones. “Then I’m sticking with you!”
She was going to follow him anywhere, no matter how hard the classes were.
Nathan didn’t say anything else. He just kept his chin propped on his hand, the corner of his mouth curling up behind his palm, his dark eyes filled with a warm, indulgent smile.
Throughout the rest of high school, he kept his promise perfectly, making sure her grades never dropped below a B+.
Whenever she was on the verge of giving up, he would drag her into an empty classroom and force her to review. Her clearest memory of high school was Nathan sitting beside her, tapping her gently on the head with his pen cap.
“Think about it. You’re smart. You can figure this out.”
“I can’t. My brain is rusted.”
“Come on. Look at it again.”
Eventually, the pen cap tapping her head had been replaced by his hand.
His fingers were long and warm, gently brushing through her hair, resting against the nape of her neck. That quiet, steady tenderness had always given her the strength to keep going.
Chloe opened her eyes.
A hand was softly stroking her hair.
For a terrifying, disorienting second, she lost track of time entirely. The boy from her dream blurred perfectly into reality, until her vision focused, and the sixteen-year-old Nathan transformed back into the hardened, middle-aged man sitting on the edge of her bed.
He was perfectly still. His hand was resting against her hair, his thumb lightly grazing her temple. A profound, suffocating melancholy hung in the air around him.
Chloe’s breath hitched. She instinctively pulled the blanket up to her chest and sat up. “What are you doing here?”
Nathan didn’t pull his hand back immediately. He looked at her, his eyes dark and heavy with a grief she couldn’t comprehend.
“I’ve sat here a lot over the years,” he murmured, his voice low and hoarse, as if he were still trapped in his own memories. “I used to sit in this room and tell myself that if I just waited until dawn, you’d come back.”
The raw weight of his words struck her heart like a physical blow.
“Chloe,” he whispered. “You’re finally back.”
Chloe bit her lip so hard she tasted copper. A sudden, violent pang of sadness welled up inside her, hot and bitter.
“Yes,” she murmured, looking away. “I’m back.”
Her quiet, guarded response seemed to jolt Nathan awake.
The spell broke. He inhaled sharply, took a step back from the bed, and stood up, his hands dropping to his sides and clenching into tight fists.
Chloe flinched slightly at the sudden movement, but the reality of their situation immediately poured cold water over her heart.
Of course he pulled away. He had remarried. He had a family. Sitting on his dead ex-wife’s bed and stroking her hair in the early morning was entirely inappropriate.
She swallowed the lump in her throat, forced her expression smooth, and asked casually, “Don’t you need to take your son to school at this hour?”
Nathan’s jaw tightened. When he spoke, his voice had regained its cold, professional composure. “No. He’s in the eighth grade. He goes by himself.”
“Oh.” Chloe exhaled a silent breath, though her chest felt hollowed out.
“Go get ready,” Nathan said, turning his back to her. “I told you I’d take you to buy a phone today.”
“Right.”
Chloe threw off the covers, quickly washed her face in the bathroom, and opened her suitcase to dig out her cash.
She paused, looking at the money, then called out toward the living room. “Nathan? How much does a phone cost now?”
Nathan walked in and stopped. He looked at the thick stack of hundred-dollar bills in her hand. They were all printed before 2002, featuring the older, smaller portrait of Benjamin Franklin.
He stepped closer, his voice gentle again. “Those are old bills, Chloe. They’re still legal tender, but you’re going to have trouble using them. Most modern self-checkout machines and newer scanners won’t recognise the watermarks.”
“What?” Chloe stared at the cash in shock. “But my dad gave these to me. They’re real money! How can they not work?”
“You can exchange them at a bank, but carrying them around for daily use isn’t going to work anymore.”
Nathan reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket, pulled out a sleek, heavy black credit card, and held it out to her. It was a supplementary card linked directly to his primary account.
“Use mine for now. The PIN is my birthday. Do you still remember it?”
“November 26th,” Chloe blurted out automatically.
A faint, dangerous smile touched the corner of Nathan’s mouth.
Chloe stared at the black card, her hand freezing in mid-air. Suddenly, the reality of what she was doing hit her.
She couldn’t take his money.
“Never mind. I can’t take your card.” She pushed his hand away, stepping back.
He had a new family now. A current wife. A son. What business did she have carrying around his supplementary credit card? She had absolutely no desire to be dragged through the streets by the hair for spending another woman’s husband’s money.
Nathan’s eyes darkened. He knew exactly what she was thinking.
“Don’t overthink it,” he said, his tone dropping into something far more authoritative. “There are still marital assets between us that were never legally settled. During the years you were gone, I made some money. Your share will be transferred to you once you’re properly settled. I’ll have my lawyers draft the paperwork.”
“There’s no need for that. We were broke when we were together. What shared assets could we possibly have?” Chloe gave a dry, awkward laugh, refusing to meet his eyes.
Nathan stared at her in silence.
Chloe shifted uncomfortably, then lifted her chin, forcing a lighter tone. “But I did put half the down payment on this house back then. You can just buy me out of my half.”
“The deed to this house is entirely in your name. It has always been yours,” Nathan said smoothly.
Before she could process that, he stepped into her space, caught her wrist, and pressed the heavy black card firmly into her palm. His fingers wrapped tightly around hers, trapping the card inside her fist.
“Take the card, Chloe.”
“I really can’t—” she started, trying to pull her hand back.
Nathan didn’t let go. He looked down at her, his dark eyes locking onto hers with an unyielding, aggressive possessiveness that absolutely refused to be argued with.
“Take it.”