A Call From Seven Years Later

Looking at those two faces, I remembered sophomore year.

I'd been so excited to introduce my new boyfriend to my best friend.

At a four-person table in the school cafeteria.

I was holding Simon's hand, and Rachel sat across from us.

I'd been too happy to notice the undercurrent moving between them.

Rachel picked up her glass of water, and the water spilled onto Simon's white shirt.

Simon was obsessively clean. Normally, if someone so much as brushed against him, he'd go change.

But that day, he just looked at Rachel, steady and quiet, and didn't lose his temper.

He even took a tissue and wiped the table in front of her first.

Back then I thought Simon was only being so patient with my best friend for my sake.

Looking back now, the cracks were everywhere.

The little boy pushed his phone closer to the camera.

“Look, ma'am, my mom and dad even have a couple account! It's full of videos they made together!”

The camera moved in close, and I saw the name of the account clearly.

——“Her Majesty Queen Rach.”

I picked up my other phone, the backup one.

My fingers trembled as I typed the words into the search bar.

It actually came up.

I opened the account.

The earliest post really did date back to high school.

The video quality from back then was still a little blurry.

It was Simon and Rachel in their school uniforms.

Running across the field, holding hands in the back row of the classroom.

Scrolling toward the middle, the posts suddenly stopped.

The gap matched, down to the day, the exact three years I was with Simon.

And in the second month after Simon's "death,"

the account started posting again.

The first video back was Simon on a yacht, down on one knee, sliding a diamond ring onto Rachel's finger.

The caption read: ：“After everything, it was still you.”

I scrolled down mechanically.

One post after another.

In the comments there were congratulations, and there were people who knew the truth, cursing them out.

One comment was hard to look at: ：“Wasn't Simon with Felicia Henson? How did he end up with her best friend? Scumbag and a snake!”

Right beneath it was a reply from Simon himself, and he'd pinned it.

“Rach is the only one in this life for me. Everyone else was just a mistake I made before I understood my own heart. The one who isn't loved is the real other woman.”

The one who isn't loved is the real other woman.

I bit down hard on my lip and tasted the sweet metal of blood.

So for three years, all I'd been was a test run, something he used to figure out what he wanted.

I kept scrolling.

They went skiing, they went diving, they went skydiving.

In the videos Rachel laughed without holding anything back, and the doting in Simon's eyes was thick enough to drown in.

And me?

For those three years, to keep Simon's startup afloat, I juggled three part-time jobs.

To save enough to buy him one decent suit, I ate plain buttered noodles for a solid month.

At the top of the page, pinned, there was a link to a long piece of writing.

It was called Confession Journal.

The cover claimed it was a novel.

But I had a feeling it was about me.

I clicked the link.

What it told was the second half of a woman's life, a woman named "Lia."

It was what happened in the future of the current timeline.

A few months from now I'd catch the first hints that Simon had faked his death, and I'd go confront them.

In their eyes, I was the one who lost her mind first.

So they struck back, and that was how my career was destroyed.

My mom, trying to get justice for me, went and knelt outside Simon's company.

And was run over by the car of one of those rich kids they ran with, both her legs crushed.