After my boyfriend fell asleep, I noticed his phone lighting up with notification after notification.

I tapped the screen and found he'd posted an answer under an online thread titled: "How far would you go for the person you loved as a teenager but could never have?"

"I've been in love with my childhood sweetheart for twelve years, but I'm with someone I don't love."

"My sweetheart had someone she was crazy about. To help her find happiness, I went after the girl her crush liked — my current girlfriend — to get rid of the competition for her."

"Now she and her crush are about to get married. As for me? She's not the one I'm with, so it doesn't matter who is."

That was when I realized I was the girlfriend he didn't love.

My hand shook, and the phone slipped onto the bed.

Jacob Harding didn't wake up, but his body shifted toward me on instinct, and he mumbled my name through his sleep: "Cindy..."

The old me might have melted at that. Might have believed he loved me just as desperately.

Now all I felt was how absurd it was.

……

I knew who his childhood sweetheart was. Vivian Chambers. She was with Ferdinand James now, a senior from my college years.

I'd met Vivian before. Jacob had mentioned her to me, but all he ever said was that they were close friends.

As for Ferdinand, he had confessed his feelings to me once, but I barely knew him, so I turned him down.

When I later found out Vivian and Ferdinand were together, I assumed it was coincidence. I even wished them well, sincerely.

Now I understood it was never coincidence. It was a game Jacob had engineered from the start, and I was just an expendable NPC in it.

I took a deep breath and kept scrolling through the post. It was a detailed chronicle of every memory he had of loving Vivian in secret.

"I knew I loved her from the time I was ten. But she never once looked at me that way."

"Of course I didn't want to see her with someone else. But I couldn't stand watching her hurt even more, so I chose to let her go."

"When she got rejected and locked herself in her room crying for three days, the hatred I felt was unbearable. I hated that the person she loved wasn't me. I hated that someone as good as her had to suffer that kind of rejection."

"But the person I hated most was my current girlfriend — for so effortlessly taking away everything she wanted."

"So I decided to help her. I went after my current girlfriend, and the plan was to break up a year later."

Only now did I understand why his eyes always carried something I could never read when he looked at me.

But he'd been so good to me. So impossibly good that I never had a single reason to doubt him.

Our one-year anniversary was a week away. I'd been happily planning how to celebrate it, how to make the day special.

I thought I'd surprise him. I thought it would make him happy.

It never occurred to me that all of it was a lie from the very beginning. A scheme. Something closer to revenge.

The comment section was full of reactions.

"Have some shame. How do you even have the nerve to post this?"

"What did your girlfriend ever do to deserve a piece of trash like you? Leave her alone."

Others saw it differently.

"He didn't cheat on her, didn't mistreat her. What's so terrible about that?"

"Am I the only one wondering — if he loved his sweetheart for so many years and never made a move, how come his girlfriend was so easy to win over?"

Jacob had replied to that comment: "With the person you love, you can only tread carefully. You're terrified of saying the wrong thing. You can't bring yourself to hurt her."

"But with my girlfriend, it was just a game of calculated affection points. Throw in a few special tactics when needed, and of course it was easy."

"If anyone's curious, I can share some of the special methods I used."

The comments section, predictably, begged for details.

Jacob replied below: "It's simple, really. Figure out what she needs most."

"Before I made my move, I spent a long time doing research. My girlfriend grew up in a single-parent household. Her family didn't have much money. She was deeply insecure."

"Plenty of guys on campus were interested in her, but most of them looked down on her because of her background. They couldn't get anywhere near her heart."

"So I showed up in the place she was most comfortable. Naturally, she let her guard down."

I remembered how I'd met Jacob. It was at the tutoring center where I worked part-time.

My family didn't have much. My mother raised me on her own, and none of it came easy.

After starting college, I refused to be another burden on her. I picked up every part-time job I could find, and that was how I met Jacob, who was supposedly there doing the same thing.

It wasn't until we were already together that I found out his family was well-off. I asked him why he'd bother picking up shifts at a tutoring center.

He just smiled and said, "My parents taught me early on that money doesn't come easy. I wanted to see what it felt like to earn my own."

But now, in that post, he'd written: "Who would actually want to work part-time if it wasn't to get close to her? And she bought it. So naive."

"But that alone wasn't enough. If you want to make someone feel safe, you have to show up when they need support the most."

"My girlfriend didn't come from money, but she was well-liked on campus. So I had to create an opportunity."

"At the time, her grades were right on the edge for a graduate-school recommendation slot. She was one spot short, and her best friend held the position right above her."

"I happened to know that her friend had someone else run the fitness test for her back in college. So I reported it. Just like that, my girlfriend got the slot."

"It was anonymous, of course. But since my girlfriend was the one who directly benefited, suspicion fell on her immediately."

"Then I pretended I didn't know anything about the recommendation situation. In a casual conversation with some mutual friends, I let it slip that my girlfriend hadn't been job hunting lately and seemed to have 'new plans.'"

"And just like that, everyone was convinced she was the one who'd done it."

The comments were blowing up now.

"Dude, don't you realize how disgusting you are? How can you even type this out?"

"Honestly I don't see the big deal. His girlfriend still benefited. It's just one friend, who cares. And if the friend hadn't cheated on the fitness test she wouldn't have gotten reported anyway."

"Am I the only one who feels bad for the friend? She lost a recommendation slot that should've been hers, all because of someone else's game."

Something sharp stabbed through my chest.

Disgusting. It was so disgusting.

If someone asked me what the most painful stretch of my college years was, it would be those weeks when everyone around me kept saying how lucky I was to land that recommendation slot. That period nearly destroyed every good memory I had of college.

My best friend was Rachel Fox. She was my roommate. We went to class together, ate together, complained about the cafeteria food together. For practically all four years, we were inseparable.

She said I was her best friend. I never doubted that I felt the same.

Her grades had always been better than mine. I never once thought about competing with her for that slot.

When the recommendation fell into my lap, it felt at first like an unexpected gift. Then it became a reason for everyone around me to look at me with contempt.

Rachel's feelings toward me shifted too. She trusted me at first. Then the rumors wore her down, seeding doubt where there had been none. And eventually, we became strangers.

Even the friends I'd once gotten along with started quietly pulling away after they heard.

I ran into Rachel on campus more times than I could count, trying to explain, but she just walked right past me every time, as if I didn't exist.

It wasn't until graduation that I learned she'd failed her grad school entrance exams and gone straight into the workforce. The guilt nearly broke me. I came close to dropping out myself.

That was when Jacob stepped in, staying by my side through it all.

When almost no one around me believed I was innocent, he was the only one who did. He told me I hadn't done anything wrong.

Looking back now, of course he believed me. He was the one who'd done it.

I'll admit it: at the time, I was genuinely moved.

Jacob and I grew much closer during that period. I confided in him constantly, and he comforted me again and again.

But now I realized that wasn't what it was at all.

Jacob wrote impatiently in the thread: "Honestly, shouldn't she be thanking me for getting that recommendation slot? Walking around looking half-dead all the time. I don't even know who that performance was for."

"If I hadn't helped her, what would she even be doing right now? Unemployed and expecting me to support her?"

Someone in the comments asked: "But what does this have to do with winning her over? She didn't actually fall for you because of it, did she?"

Jacob replied immediately: "You're exactly right. She was so wrapped up in that whole mess back then, it never even crossed her mind that I was being nice to her because I wanted to date her."

"And here's the thing. The whole reason I went after her in the first place was to make my childhood sweetheart's crush stop being interested in her. But even after her reputation tanked that badly, the guy still couldn't let her go."

"So I came up with a new plan."

"You want to know where that guy lost? He was too careful. Too cautious to make a real move. Same way I am with my childhood sweetheart, actually."

"But that's normal, I guess. When a guy truly likes someone, that's how he acts."

"He was worried about my girlfriend's mental state, so he kept having people deliver gifts to her. Good thing I intercepted every single one."

I never knew Ferdinand had done any of that.

Then Jacob shifted gears: "But that wasn't enough. My goal wasn't just to get with her. I needed him to give up on her completely."

"Around that time, my girlfriend couldn't take the passive bullying from her roommate and classmates anymore, so she wanted to move off campus. She picked up a new tutoring gig to cover the rent."

"The kid she was tutoring came from an insanely rich family, and they treated her well. Before every session, they'd send a driver to campus to pick her up."

"I didn't do much. I just happened to walk by with my roommate one time when she was getting picked up, made sure people saw her climbing into a luxury car."

"She'd suddenly moved out of the dorms, and now she was getting into expensive cars. Given that she was on financial aid, it wasn't hard for people to jump to conclusions."

"That night I went back and posted about it anonymously on the campus forum. The rumor spread fast. Within hours, people were saying she had a sugar daddy."

"She had plenty of guys chasing her at school, so I posted that she liked stringing people along. Combined with everything before, she was already completely isolated. Public opinion turned on her overnight." By the time I read this far, I was gripping my phone so hard my knuckles ached, forcing down the nausea clawing up my throat.

Near graduation, I'd thought I would finally escape those looks, finally start over. Instead, all I got was more abuse.

During that time, no matter where I went, the people around me watched me with undisguised malice.