Too Late For His Apology

The night my high school sweetheart was supposed to propose, a future version of him appeared and ordered him to choose another girl. He claimed our love would bring ruin. And Joshua, the boy who promised me forever, believed him.

He began choosing her over me, again and again. He chose her fake panic attacks over my real terror, hanging up on me as I begged for help while being cornered in a dark alley. He left me there, alone and defenseless.

The final betrayal came when he agreed to let thugs give me a "warning" to stay away.

While he was at the hospital comforting her, I was being brutally beaten in a locked room, my bones broken on his command.

The boy I loved, my protector since childhood, had let them destroy me.

I sent him the photos of my battered body with a final message: "We're done." Then I booked a one-way flight to another country and vanished, erasing every trace of the girl he once knew.

Chapter 1

Clara Holt POV:

The night Joshua was supposed to promise me forever, another him-an older, colder version-appeared out of thin air and told him to choose someone else.

It was graduation night. The air on the football field was thick with the scent of cheap hairspray, wilting corsages, and the electric promise of futures stretching out before us like an open road. Laughter echoed under the temporary floodlights as my classmates threw their caps into the air, a final, collective scream of teenage freedom.

I stood beside Joshua Morrow, my hand tucked securely in his. For as long as I could remember, it had always been Joshua and me. Our futures were a shared map, the lines drawn in ink, leading straight to the same Ivy League campus in the fall.

He squeezed my hand, his familiar warmth a comforting anchor in the swirling chaos. "Clara," he murmured, his voice low and serious, cutting through the noise. "There' s something I need to ask you."

My heart did a little flip. This was it. The moment we' d whispered about on late-night phone calls, the official start to the "forever" we'd already promised each other a thousand times. He was the star quarterback, I was the valedictorian. We were the high school sweethearts everyone rooted for.

He led me toward the relative quiet of the bleachers, his gaze intense. "We've been planning this for so long," he began, his thumb tracing circles on the back of my hand. "Yale, our apartment, everything..."

And then, it happened.

A flicker. A distortion in the air, like heat rising from summer asphalt, coalesced right beside Joshua. A man materialized from nothing. He looked like Joshua-exactly like him, but older. Harsher. The lines around his eyes were carved by something other than laughter, and his jaw was set with a grim finality.

I gasped, stumbling back. Joshua froze, his eyes wide with disbelief.

"Don't do it," the stranger said. His voice was Joshua's, but stripped of all warmth, like a recording played on a dying battery. He wasn't looking at me. His cold eyes were locked on Joshua. "You can't go to Yale with her."

"Who... who are you?" Joshua stammered, pulling me behind him protectively.

"I'm you," the man said flatly. "From a future you're about to destroy. Your destiny isn't with Clara. It's with Amelia Mcclain."

The name hung in the air, sour and out of place. Amelia Mcclain. A shy, mousy girl from the other side of town who always looked like she was about to burst into tears.

"That's insane," Joshua said, shaking his head. "You're not me."

"Amelia needs you," Future Joshua insisted, his gaze unwavering. "If you stay with Clara, you'll bring ruin to everyone. Amelia will suffer a fate worse than death, and it will be your fault. You will regret it for the rest of your life." He spoke of this future not as a possibility, but as a documented fact.

"I love Clara," Joshua said, his voice cracking. He looked at me, his eyes pleading for me to believe him, to help him make sense of this madness.

"You think you do," Future Joshua sneered. "But your love for Amelia will eclipse everything. It's a love that will define you, a love you're destined for. This," he gestured dismissively at me, "is a high school crush. A mistake you need to correct before it's too late."

I stood there, frozen, my world tilting on its axis. The confession, the shared future, it was all dissolving like sand through my fingers. The scene was so bizarre, so impossible, that for a moment I thought it was a prank.

But the look on Joshua's face wasn't amusement. It was dawning horror and, worse, confusion. He was susceptible, always driven by a deep-seated, almost naive sense of duty. This stranger, this twisted reflection of him, knew exactly which strings to pull.

My planned future with Joshua was being erased, and the eraser was a ghost with his own face.

The conversation I couldn't hear ended. Future Joshua vanished as quickly as he'd appeared, leaving behind a chilling silence. Joshua didn' t look at me. His gaze was distant, fixed on the spot where the other him had stood.

"Joshua?" I whispered, my voice trembling.

He finally turned to me, but his eyes were different. The certainty was gone, replaced by a shadow of fear and a terrible, misplaced sense of responsibility. The "prophecy" had taken root.

He dropped my hand.

The gesture was small, but it felt like a chasm opening between us. The prom queen was being crowned on the makeshift stage, her sparkly tiara catching the light. Someone's parents were setting off fireworks, painting the sky in bursts of red and gold. Our perfect moment was over.

He didn't say a word. He just turned and walked away from me, his broad shoulders slumping as he scanned the dispersing crowd. His eyes weren't searching for me.

I knew, with a certainty that iced over my heart, who he was looking for.

Amelia.

He found her near the exit, a lone, fragile figure clutching her yearbook. I watched, paralyzed, as he walked up to her. He said something, and she looked up, her perpetually startled eyes widening.

My Joshua, the boy who had bandaged my scraped knees and held my hand through every horror movie, was now bending down slightly to hear whatever she was whispering. He forgot my favorite color last week, chalking it up to stress. But he remembered that Amelia was allergic to peanuts when she sat near us at lunch yesterday.

He nodded, a look of grave concern on his face. He gently took the yearbook from her hands, as if it were a fragile bird, and then he did something that shattered the last piece of my composure. He shrugged off his letterman jacket-the one with his name and number stitched on the back, the one I had worn a hundred times-and draped it over her thin shoulders.

It was a gesture of protection. A gesture that used to belong to me.

My heart didn't just break. It felt like it was being methodically dissected, piece by painful piece. I was standing in the middle of a celebration, but all I could feel was the cold, creeping dread of being replaced.

Our shared map was being redrawn. And on this new version, I was no longer on it. He was supposed to drive me home. We were supposed to talk about our new apartment near campus until the sun came up.

But as he walked Amelia toward the parking lot, he didn't even glance back.

He had forgotten me already.