My sophomore year, my boyfriend threw himself in front of me during a mudslide. The current swept him away. They never found a body.

I cried until I collapsed and ended up hospitalized. The diagnosis was severe depression.

His elderly mother lived alone out in the countryside with no one to look after her, so I dropped out of school and took care of her for three full years.

My classmates all said I was a fool, that I'd thrown away my youth for a dead man.

But I could never forget the look in his eyes the moment he pushed me out of the way. Desperate. And so full of love.

The fourth year, I moved back to the city where we'd first met. I was trying to start over.

That day I'd picked up a delivery gig, dropping off prenatal supplements to a penthouse duplex.

The door was slightly ajar. I was about to knock when a voice drifted out from the inner room. A man's voice. So familiar it shook something loose in my bones.

"Babe, take your supplements later, okay? Don't be upset."

My head snapped up. Through the crack in the door, I saw his face.

…

"Os… Oswald Delgado?"

The door swung all the way open.

He stood in the warm glow of the entryway, dressed in loose loungewear.

I was wearing the blue vest from the delivery app, mud splattered up the legs of my pants from riding a scooter through puddles.

"You spilled the medicine."

He didn't say my name. His voice was flat. Distant.

"If you can't afford to replace the carpet, fine. Just clean it up."

"You don't recognize me?"

I could hear my own voice shaking.

"I'm Denise. Denise Henson."

He didn't even lift his eyes.

"Don't know you."

Behind him, the sound of slippers padding across hardwood. A woman emerged from the inner room, belly round and heavy with pregnancy.

She slipped her arm through Oswald's, casual and possessive.

"Oswald, why haven't you brought my supplements in yet?"

Her gaze drifted past his shoulder and landed on me, standing in the doorway like something the rain dragged in.

"Who's this?"

"The delivery girl. She spilled the medicine."

"Oh."

The woman drew the word out, her eyes sliding over me from head to toe. Her nose wrinkled in disgust.

"Well, make her clean it up then. She got my carpet dirty. There's a rag by the washing machine on the balcony."

She was ordering me around. Like hired help.

I stared at Oswald's face, hard, waiting for him to say something. Anything. An explanation.

He said nothing.

He just stepped aside, clearing the path, gesturing for me to go get the rag.

My legs carried me inside before my mind could catch up.

On the entryway console sat their wedding portrait. The woman leaned into his arms, smiling like she'd won the world.

The date was printed in the bottom right corner. It was taken the second year after I'd dropped out to care for his mother.

At the far end of the living room, the master bedroom door hung half open. An older woman in a nightgown sat in a chaise lounge, peeling cherries and watching TV.

Serena Whitney.

The woman I'd waited on for three years.

Winters, when her arthritis flared, I pressed hot towels to her knees every single night.

She loved sauerkraut fish stew. I made it over twenty times before I got it right, before she finally said it was good enough.

Every time she finished eating, she'd grab my hand and call me her good girl.

"Mom, the delivery girl got the carpet dirty. I told her to wipe it up."

The woman called toward the bedroom.

Serena looked up. Her eyes passed over me.

Three years.

Over a thousand days and nights.

"Hurry it up. Don't go touching things that aren't yours. Country folk never do have any manners."

Her attention swung back to the woman almost instantly. She waved her over, patting the seat beside her, face bright with warmth.

"Wanda Simmons, did the baby move today? Any kicking? Let me tell you, when Oswald was little, he kicked like crazy too…"

I knelt on the floor, dragging the rag across the carpet, scrubbing at the medicine stain over and over.

My knees pressed into the cold tile. Serena's laughter floated out from the bedroom in waves.

Her voice sounded so much stronger than it had three years ago.

Back then, she'd lain on that wooden plank bed in the old house, mumbling the same thing day after day. My son is gone. I don't want to live either.

I wiped the last stain clean and stood up.

Oswald was leaning against the wall by the entryway, hands shoved in his pockets, his face completely blank as he waited for me to leave.

"Who are you, really?"

I squeezed the rag in my fist.

"I told you. I don't know you. Get out."

"If you don't leave now, I'm calling security."

His voice was flat. Not a single crack in it.

Two uniformed guards grabbed me by the arms and dragged me out through the front entrance.

Outside, it had started raining at some point. Heavy, relentless sheets of it hammered the seat of my scooter with a sharp, staccato beat.

The guards shoved me into the rain. Oswald's voice came through the walkie-talkie.

"This woman is not allowed back inside the complex. Log her face into the blacklist."

I stood in the rain, soaked through, the blue delivery vest plastered to my body.

I tilted my head back and looked up at the twenty-third floor, where warm light glowed behind the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The curtains drew shut.

The rain came down harder.

I didn't know how long I'd been standing there before a black umbrella appeared over my head.

My heart slammed once against my ribs.

I turned. It was him.

Oswald had changed into a trench coat. One hand held the umbrella; the other held something balled up.

His dress shoes stood in the pooling water, the cuffs of his trousers soaked halfway up, but he didn't seem to care.

He came to find me.

My lips were trembling. Before I could get a word out, I watched him look down and drop the thing in his hand onto the ground.

A scarf.

I'd knitted it for him the winter of my freshman year. It took me two full weeks to learn how. I'd pricked my fingers more times than I could count.

The scarf landed in a puddle, soaking up mud.

He lifted his foot and ground his sole into it.

"I don't know how you tracked down this address."

His voice was low, nearly swallowed by the rain.

"But I'm warning you. Don't come around here again."

"I'm married. You harassed my wife. She's pregnant. She can't handle this kind of stress."

"And if you even think about using the past to threaten me, my legal team will show you exactly what an extortion charge looks like."

He closed the umbrella.

Rain poured down between us, poured down onto the ruined scarf on the ground. He turned to leave.

Four years.

I'd dropped out of college to take care of his mother. Lived from twenty to twenty-four pouring every last drop of my youth and every cent of my savings into the bottomless pit of a dead boyfriend's family.

My classmates called me stupid. My relatives called me insane.

Every morning, the first thing I did was take my medication. The second was cook porridge for Serena.

I bent down, scooped the scarf out of the puddle with both hands, mud and water dripping from my fingers, and hurled it straight into his chest.

"You don't know me, Oswald? Is that what you're going with?"

He went rigid.

The next second, a black SUV came tearing around the corner and screeched to a stop at the curb.

Wanda burst out with an umbrella, and her eyes locked instantly on the filthy smear across Oswald's chest and then on me standing behind him.

"Oh my God! Oswald! Are you okay? Is this psycho stalking you? Did she attack you?"

She threw her arms around his, shrinking behind him, and stared at me with wide, horrified eyes.

"I'm calling the police!"

"It's okay, Wanda. Don't be scared."

Oswald pulled her against his shoulder, his expression turning cold.

He took out his phone and dialed 911.

The patrol car arrived fast.

Wanda wept like a flower caught in the rain, clutching her belly, gasping over and over that she was terrified.

Oswald held her close and gave his statement in a steady, measured voice. He never looked at me once.

I was put in the back of the patrol car.

The fluorescent lights at the station were blinding.

I sat in a metal chair, my clothes still dripping, a small pool forming at my feet.

Across from me sat the officer taking my statement. Beside him stood Oswald's private attorney and a bodyguard Wanda had sent.

Wanda sat in the lounge next door sipping warm milk. Every now and then, her voice drifted through the wall as she chatted with a friend on the phone.

"I was so scared. Some delivery-gig psycho nearly hurt my baby..."

"Are you sure you know the person who filed the report?"

The officer looked up at me.

"He's my boyfriend. Four years ago, he pushed me out of the way during a mudslide and got swept away. Everyone thought he was dead. Including me."

Oswald's lawyer strode over and cut me off.

"Officer, my client Mr. Delgado has never participated in any volunteer teaching program, nor has he ever had any relationship with this woman. Her claims lack any factual basis and constitute fabrication of evidence and stalking."

"I have proof."

I pulled the old phone from my pocket.

One corner of the screen was shattered. Water damage. The touchscreen barely responded.

It took me a long time to scroll through, but I found the photo album.

The first picture was of me and Oswald at the teaching site.

He'd been wearing a white T-shirt, tanned dark from the sun, grinning so wide you could see every tooth.

I had my arms around his, my cheek pressed to his shoulder.

Behind us stood the gate of that little village school.

The photos after that included letters he'd written me, then chat logs, then transfer records.

And beyond those, screenshots of over a dozen credit card statements from the medical bills and nursing fees I'd covered for Serena.

Every date, every amount, every timeline laid out plain as day.

I turned the phone around to show the officer. My voice was raw.

"Is this enough?"

The officer took the phone and went through it carefully.

Wanda had appeared in the doorway at some point. The color was draining from her face.

She saw the photos of us together.

She saw the chat logs where Oswald called me Dee and promised to marry me after graduation.

She saw the six-figure debt I'd shouldered alone, cleaning up after a dead man's life.

"Oswald?"

Her voice was thin. Barely there.

"What is this?"

Not a single crack appeared on Oswald's face.

"Photoshopped."

He didn't even glance at the screen.

"AI can do anything these days. Five hundred bucks gets you a whole family portrait."

He turned to Wanda, took her hand, and lowered his voice.

"Don't listen to her nonsense, babe. You're pregnant. Don't let yourself get upset."

Wanda pressed a hand to her stomach and stepped back. Her face was white.

Oswald turned back to me. Something finally surfaced in his eyes.

It was anger.

He walked over, crouched in front of me until we were eye level.

Then he kicked my knee.

The chair flipped backward. I went with it, tumbling off the step. My forehead cracked against the edge of a concrete planter, and something warm and wet ran down past my brow.

"Filing a false report. Fabricating evidence. Harassing a pregnant woman."

He stood over me, looking down.

"How much did you think you could squeeze out of me?"

The officer rushed over and pulled him back. Oswald let himself be moved, straightened his cuffs, put his arm around Wanda, and walked out.

Blood seeped into my eyes. The world blurred red.

Every sound was pulling further away.

The last image that floated up was from four years ago.

A rain-drenched hillside. Oswald using every ounce of strength to shove me clear of the mud. His mouth moving, telling me to run, don't look back.

His face covered in mud and blood. But he was smiling at me.

The clinic ceiling had a large water stain.

Four stitches in my forehead. The gauze had already soaked through, the blood darkening to a deep rust.

Twenty-three missed calls on my phone.

All from the same number.

The children's hospital ICU.