My phone beeped, and there was a message from Shelby.

And while there was no way to parse out her tone, I felt in my gut like something was wrong. Maybe because the text was so short, with no greeting, no flowers or emojis. I knew that she needed me.

But before I could tell my mother that I had to go, she hugged me and said she was off to have a small get-together with her professor and a few of her classmates. She kissed my forehead. “Love you, kiddo!”

“I love you, too. And you did a really good job tonight.” Then I practically sprinted out to my van.

Fortunately the campus wasn’t too far from my apartment, so it didn’t take me long to get home. When I burst through the door, I expected to find . . . I didn’t know what I expected. It certainly wasn’t Shelby sitting on the couch watching a Noah Douglas movie and eating chocolate chip cookie dough.

“Hey.” She didn’t make eye contact with me.

I closed the door and said hi back. I shrugged my jacket off, leaving it on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “Is everything okay?”

“I just wanted a girls’ night.”

That wasn’t it. I heard the pain and sadness in her voice. But whatever was wrong with her, she didn’t seem quite ready to tell me yet. I’d just wait until she was. I grabbed a spoon from the kitchen and sat down on the couch next to her. In this movie Noah played a medieval knight avenging the murder of his wife and child. We watched the movie for about an hour until it got to the scene where Noah’s character was about to kiss the princess he’d fallen in love with during his quest.

Shelby paused the movie just as the kiss started and put her spoon and the tub of dough on the coffee table and announced, “I’m going to break up with Allan.”

She immediately burst into sobs while I put my arms around her. “What? Why? Did something happen? Did he do something? I’ll kill him if he cheated on you. I’m not even kidding.”

“No,” she said in a muffled voice. “Tonight Allan’s mother told him that if he married me, she would never speak to him again.”

Why would that make Shelby want to break up with Allan? “So? That sounds like a good deal to me. You get Allan and you don’t have to deal with Harmony.”

“But how can I do that? I don’t want him to have to choose. I don’t want to come between him and his family.”