I’d been at ChimeIn for two weeks now, and I’d stuck to the floors and rooms I was assigned. Never wandered. Never explored. There was one room down the hall with a frosted glass door I hadn’t gone into yet. The only one without a nameplate.

The only one that seemed off-limits.

Curiosity got the better of me.

I walked slowly, my footsteps muffled by the thick black carpet, and pushed open the door without really thinking about it.

My heart hitched painfully in my chest, faltering for a split second before it slammed back into rhythm—harder, faster. My body wasn’t mine anymore. It was heat and static and memory.

“Blake,” I whispered, the name escaping before I could stop it.

Behind a desk. Wearing a navy button-down rolled up to his elbows. Hair longer than I remembered. Head bent over a file, eyes flicking across the page with that same laser focus I’d seen a thousand times before.

First came the shock. Like stepping into a memory you swore you’d buried. Like someone had reached into my chest and yanked my ribs wide open. Then came the heat. That awful, electric heat that starts in the gut and climbs its way up like a fever. Anger, maybe. Or worse—longing. Followed immediately by the bone-deep, impossible need to touch him.

Two years. Two years of silence, distance, aching.

Of all the things I thought I might find behind that door, he wasn’t one of them. He looked older now. Fuller in the shoulders. More put-together. But still Blake. Still the boy who once made me grilled cheese at 3 a.m. because I had cramps. Still the boy who used to read Arabic under our oak tree with the kind of reverence that broke my heart. Still the boy who carried me out of the cafeteria when I bled through my jeans. Still the boy who kept a Polaroid of me tucked inside his book. The boy who kissed my forehead before he disappeared. The boy who left a hole so deep in my chest I wasn’t sure it would ever close.

The boy who broke my heart with his silence.

The man who shattered it with his absence.

I didn’t realize I was gripping the folder so tightly until it bent in my hand. Blake was reading something—until he wasn’t. Until his eyes lifted and locked onto mine, probably expecting Maxine.

My breath hitched. My pulse roared in my ears.

Blake’s mouth parted slightly. His fingers stopped moving.

We stared at each other for what felt like lifetimes.

Something in me wanted to turn and run. Something else—something louder—ached to cross the room and press my hand against his chest just to make sure he was real.

His fingers curled around the edge of the desk.