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