She’d been the one to break up with him, but there was no victory or solace in that fact. She’d only broken up with Charlie because she could tell that he wanted to break up with her. They’d been fighting all the time, over nothing, and she could tell by the way he looked at her that he didn’t really like her much anymore. Summer wasn’t sure that she liked him much, either—but that was cold comfort.

Charlie had been in love with her.

He absolutely had. For a while.

And now he wasn’t.

And Summer didn’t like the mathematical implications there. If the only person who’d ever been in love with her had gradually gotten bored with her, that didn’t bode well for the next person to fall in love with Summer. If there was a next person.

What if there was only ever Charlie?

True love wasn’t guaranteed. No one owed you love. And you couldn’t earn it.

You just had to be in the right place for it.

Summer had been in the right place for it, with Charlie—Oldfather Hall. They were in the same modern languages class. Summer had been reading a book that Charlie had read, too, and he’d started talking to her about it.

Later he told her that he’d noticed her before that, that he’d liked her auburn hair and these earrings she wore sometimes, with little bells on them.

The henna eventually washed out of Summer’s hair. And Charlie eventually told her that he felt like Summer had been misleading him from the very start—like the first thing he’d liked about her wasn’t really a thing about her. Maybe everything he thought he liked about her was just a false flag . . .

It was so unfair. Summer didn’t even wear makeup.

None of this boded well for Charlie, either. It meant he could be easily fooled and long delayed. They’d wasted more than a year on each other.

Summer had settled on “Silent All These Years” as her breakup song because it made her sad in ways she didn’t even understand. The piano part at the beginning was so unsettling, and Tori Amos’s voice crawled right under her skin . . .

“Years go by, will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand?”

Summer had sobbed the first time she listened to this song after the breakup—after Charlie left her room for the last time. It had felt so good to cry. Like her outsides matched her insides. (How often did that happen?) Like she was perfectly centered inside herself and her misery.

She wished she could keep crying like that.

The song lost its power the more that Summer listened to it. Now it was just keeping her suspended in a permanent state of dull grief.