Chapter 4

Tiffany' s campaign against me became more insidious. She stopped orchestrating big, dramatic events and moved on to a quiet, relentless psychological war. She knew what mattered to me, and she targeted it with ruthless precision.

One afternoon, I came back to my room to find the small, framed photograph of my parents shattered on the floor. It was the only picture I had of them. My hands trembled as I picked up the pieces of glass. I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that Tiffany had done it. But there was no proof. When I confronted her, she just looked at me with wide, innocent eyes and said, "Oh, Sarah, that's terrible. The new cleaning lady must have knocked it over. You should be more careful with your things."

That was the moment I snapped. The grief and rage I had been suppressing for weeks boiled over. I screamed at her, calling her a liar, a monster. I grabbed her arm, my fingers digging into her skin, shaking her as I demanded she admit what she' d done.

Of course, that was the exact moment Ethan chose to walk in.

He saw me, my face contorted with rage, my hands on a "cowering" Tiffany. He saw exactly what she wanted him to see.

"Get your hands off her!" he roared, pulling me away from her.

He shoved me, and I stumbled back, hitting the wall hard. The look on his face was one of utter disgust. "I don't even know who you are anymore, Sarah."

From that day on, "we need to break up" became his go-to threat. He used it whenever I disagreed with him, whenever I failed to show Tiffany the respect he thought she deserved, whenever he just wanted to feel powerful.

Each time, a piece of me died. I would beg, I would cry, I would promise to be better. I desperately tried to explain Tiffany' s manipulations, but my words were just noise to him. I was trapped in a nightmare of her making, and the person I loved most was holding the door shut.

I realized then that Tiffany was a master of this game. She knew how to play the victim so perfectly that she made everyone else look like the aggressor. She was a professional manipulator, and I was just an amateur.

Her next target was my future. She knew my only way out was my university application. One evening, I found her at my computer, a look of fake concern on her face.

"Oh, Sarah, I was just trying to help you organize your files, and I think I might have accidentally deleted something," she said, her voice dripping with false sympathy. "I'm so sorry."

My blood ran cold. I pushed past her and saw that my application essay, the one I had spent months perfecting, was gone. But it wasn't just deleted. I checked the computer's history. She had logged into my application portal and changed my first-choice university from the prestigious design school I dreamed of to a small, local community college. She was trying to trap me here.

Luckily, I caught it in time. I managed to restore my essay from a backup and fix my application. But the incident terrified me. She wasn't just trying to drive a wedge between me and Ethan; she was trying to destroy my life.

All the while, she maintained her public facade of a sweet, grateful, and slightly clumsy girl. To the Reeds and their social circle, she was a darling. To me, she was a monster hiding in plain sight.

I watched Ethan change. The warmth in his eyes when he looked at me was gone, replaced by a constant flicker of annoyance and disappointment. He still kept me around, a habit he couldn't quite break, but the love was gone. It had been hollowed out and replaced with something ugly.

I kept trying. I kept fighting for us, for the boy who had once been my protector. I thought if I just tried hard enough, he would see the truth. I thought our history, our deep-rooted connection, had to count for something.

But my efforts only pushed him further away. My desperation made me look pathetic. My warnings made me sound crazy.

The final, fatal blow came from that voice memo. Hearing him describe me as a "puppy underfoot," hearing him casually plot to hurt me for his own amusement, hearing the complete and utter lack of love or even respect in his voice-it was like a switch being flipped in my brain.

The fight was over. I had lost.

But in that loss, I found something else. A cold, hard clarity. I wasn't just losing him; I was losing myself. And I wasn't willing to do that anymore.

I sat down at my computer, opened my university portal, and looked at the acceptance letters. The one from my dream school was there, but so was another one, from a university abroad that had offered me a full scholarship. An escape route.

I clicked "accept." A new chapter was about to begin.