Chapter 4 – The Weight of Memory

Cordelia lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling while the city murmured outside her window.

She should have felt triumphant. She had faced Adrian Anderson, the boy who had once carved the word ugly into her self-image, and she hadn’t crumbled. She had smiled, spoken, even laughed. Her walls had held.

So why did it feel as though something inside her was trembling?

She turned on her side, hugging her pillow, trying to shove him out of her thoughts. But memory is a trickster; it doesn’t obey logic. She wanted to replay his cruel smirk, the sting of that long-ago insult, as fuel for her resolve. Instead, what surfaced was his laughter in tuition class, warm and easy. The way he leaned back in his chair, eyes half-lidded, when he was pretending to be bored but secretly listening. The rare moments when his compliments—“Good point, Cordelia” or “You argued that well”—had sent a flush to her cheeks.

Why those memories? she wondered bitterly. Why not the one that ruined me?

It was maddening. Every time she thought of Adrian, the good eclipsed the bad. She remembered his confidence, his spark, his presence. And though the insult had cut her deeper than she cared to admit, the rest of him lingered in her heart like a stubborn echo.

Cordelia pressed her palms against her eyes, as though she could blot out the contradictions. Am I some kind of masochist? she thought. Why else would I keep remembering the boy who broke me, but only through the lens of everything that drew me to him in the first place?

It was easier to call it weakness, to accuse herself of clinging to pain. But the truth was more complicated, more dangerous: she had once liked Adrian—truly, achingly liked him. His careless cruelty hadn’t erased that. It had only twisted it into something harder to name.

And now here he was again.

She could still hear his voice from the dinner, softer, steadier than she remembered. If I missed seeing you then… that was my loss.

Why had he said that? Did he mean it? Or was it another careless remark that would lodge in her heart for years?

Cordelia sat up, restless, pushing her hair from her face. She hated this uncertainty, this pull between anger and tenderness. Part of her wanted to scream, to tell him exactly how much he had wounded her. Another part—the part that still remembered his laughter in the old tuition classroom—wanted to believe he had changed.

And beneath it all was a terrifying possibility: that she had never really stopped caring.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand, startling her. A message lit the screen.

Adrian: Made it home?

She stared at the words, heart hammering. Simple. Polite. But for Cordelia, it was like standing on the edge of a cliff, deciding whether to leap.

Her fingers hovered. She could ignore it, pretend the evening had meant nothing. Or she could answer, opening a door she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to step through.

After a long minute, she typed back:

Cordelia: Yes. Goodnight.

She set the phone aside quickly, as though it had burned her hand. But lying back down, she couldn’t stop the faintest smile tugging at her lips.

Masochist or not, something inside her was shifting.

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