The sky had turned a bruised, ugly purple by the time Ava reached the edge of the lake.
She wasn't running anymore. She couldn't. Her legs felt like lead, and the air in her lungs was sharp, tasting of ozone and impending rain. She stood at the end of the small wooden pier, her fingers trembling as she gripped the cold railing.
Everything was a lie.
The way he had looked at her during their first date. The way he had listened to her stories about her mother. Even the way he had touched her in the water—it was all a sequence of moves in a game she didn't know she was playing.
The first heavy drop of rain hit her cheek, followed by another, and then the sky simply opened up. Within seconds, she was drenched, her clothes clinging to her skin like a shroud. But she didn't move. The cold was a relief. It was honest. Unlike him.
"Ava!"
The voice shattered the sound of the downpour.
She didn't have to turn around to know it was him. She knew the rhythm of his footsteps, the way his voice carried a certain weight even when he was breathless.
Nicholas skidded onto the wooden slats of the pier, his chest heaving. He looked wrecked. His hair was plastered to his forehead, and the usual polished confidence of Nicholas Wolfe had been stripped away, leaving something raw and bleeding underneath.
"Go away, Nicholas," she said, her voice flat. She didn't turn around. She couldn't look at the face she had fallen for.
"I won't," he panted, stepping closer. "I'm not leaving you out here in this."
"Why not?" She finally turned, her eyes red and burning. "Is there a bonus for making sure the trophy doesn't get pneumonia? Did the guys bet on that, too?"
Nicholas flinched as if she had physically struck him. He stopped a few feet away, the rain blurring the space between them. "I deserve that. I deserve every word you throw at me. But please, Ava... just listen to me for one minute."
"I've listened to you for weeks!" she screamed over the thunder. "I listened to every 'real' thing you told me. I listened to you tell me I made the noise stop. Was that in the script? Or did you just improvise that part to make sure I'd let you into my bed?"
"No," Nicholas roared back, his voice breaking. "That was the only thing that wasn't part of the plan! The plan was to win. The plan was to be the guy who could get anyone. But then I sat with you in that library, and you looked at me like you saw right through the bullshit, and I... I panicked."
He took a step toward her, his hands out, palms up in a desperate gesture of surrender.
"I kept the game going because I was terrified that if I told you the truth, you'd walk away. And by the time I realized I loved you, I was already buried in the lie. I was a coward, Ava. A pathetic, selfish coward."
Ava felt a sob catch in her throat, a jagged thing that hurt to swallow. "You let me believe I was safe. I told you things I've never told anyone. I gave you... I gave you everything."
"And I will spend the rest of my life trying to be the man who deserves what you gave me," he whispered, stepping into her space. He reached out, his fingers hovering just inches from her wet shoulder. "Last night... that wasn't a game. I wasn't thinking about a bet. I wasn't thinking about the guys. I was thinking about the fact that for the first time in my life, I felt like I was home."
Ava looked at his hand, then up at his eyes. For a second, she saw the boy she had fallen in love with—the one who was gentle and soft.
But then she remembered the group chat. She remembered the laughing emojis next to her name.
She stepped back, her heel hitting the very edge of the pier.
"You don't get to have a home in me," she said, her voice trembling but cold. "You burned that house down the second you turned my heart into a punchline."
"Ava—"
"Don't follow me back," she warned, wiping the rain and tears from her face with a shaking hand. "If you ever actually cared about me—even for a second—you'll stay on this pier and let me go."
Nicholas froze. The agony on his face was so profound it almost made her reach for him, but the wound was too deep. He watched her walk past him, his arms dropping to his sides, defeated.
"I do love you," he called out into the rain, his voice disappearing into the wind.
Ava didn't look back. She walked through the mud and the dark, her heart a hollow, echoing chamber.
The retreat was over. The game was won. And as she reached her cabin door, she realized the worst part of all:
Nicholas Wolfe had won the bet. He had made her love him.
And now, she had to figure out how to live with the ghost of a man who never existed.