My best friend, Sloane’s, babysitter returned me home after picking our five-year-old selves up from the first day of Charleston Zoo’s summer camp. And there he was—a scrawny stranger playing basketball by the garage with my older brother, Noah, as movers unloaded furniture from two yellow vans parked in front of the house next door. I tripped on one of the scooters Noah often left lying on the asphalt driveway and was saved from the unfortunate fate of two skinned knees—the worst non-life-threatening injury besides a stubbed toe, in my opinion—by quick reflexes.

I looked up into the green eyes of my seven-year-old savior, and I was done.

Bye, heart. It was nice knowing you.

Following that fateful afternoon, my feelings for Grayson Phillips went through cyclical phases. Awed, annoyed, attempts at apathy. Five months older than Noah, he was a couple of grades ahead of me in school. A small separation that felt gaping, especially when the two of them moved on to middle school and then high school.

As we grew older, Noah became less childish and more protective. He’d invite—even encourage—me to hang out with him and his friends. I spent plenty of time around Gray from the day he moved in next door until he moved out when I was sixteen. The more time I spent around Gray, the better I became at acting indifferent toward him. I adamantly denied having a crush on Gray to all of my friends, even Sloane, especially once it became very evident he was interested in girls, just not me.

It probably would have been a more convincing lie if not for the fact that Gray was the guy every girl had a crush on.

The last time I saw him was almost four years ago—he was back in Charleston on break from the Air Force Academy in Colorado, and I was home from Boston, visiting my parents. Noah and I ended up at a local bar to catch up with a bunch of people from high school. Gray showed up as I was ordering a drink and proceeded to loudly ask if little Evie Collins was old enough to consume alcohol. Never mind that I was only six weeks past twenty-one at the time. He followed it up with a joke about my bangs, which I now acknowledge were a mistake. He left after forty-five minutes—not that I counted—with Miranda Hendrix, my junior year biology partner.

That was the extent of our interaction.