Chapter 1

Julian was clinically depressed.

To cheer him up, his childhood best friend, Maya, pulled endless pranks on me.

When I wanted to switch jobs, she posed as an executive from a Fortune 500 company to recruit me, only to trick me into showing up at an open audition for a gentlemen's club.

When I planned a vacation with Julian, she offered to book our tickets, only to intentionally give me the wrong flight time, leaving me to watch them fly off together.

Yet I couldn’t get mad. Julian would always say:

"Maya’s just trying to help me feel better. Don’t you want me to get well soon?"

I endured it all, telling myself it was worth it as long as he recovered.

Then came my birthday. My parents flew in from out of state just to visit me.

Desperate, I begged Julian to tell Maya no pranks today.

He nodded, even offering to drive out and pick up my parents himself.

I waited at home for hours, but they never showed.

Around ten that night, Julian finally called:

"Happy birthday! Scavenger hunt time. Find your hidden parents within five hours, and there’s a prize at the end."

Panicked, I sped toward the GPS pin he sent.

I found my parents shivering at the bottom of a barren, wind-whipped hillside on the outskirts of town, their faces flushed red from the biting cold.

Julian jumped out from behind the brush, grinning ear to ear:

"That was the first prank I designed entirely on my own! Congrats, you beat the challenge. Your prize is a trip to City Hall tomorrow to marry me!"

A memory flashed through my mind. His psychiatrist had called me that very afternoon:

"I couldn’t reach him on his phone. The head nurse told me he tried to force her to write a prescription last week. He’s been in full remission for months now. There’s really no medical need for it anymore."

I looked up at his radiant, self-satisfied smile.

It turned my stomach.

I didn’t say a word. I grabbed my parents’ hands and turned around.

Seeing my grim expression, my dad even tried to defend him:

"Julian didn’t leave us out here on purpose, sweetheart. His EV ran out of charge right after he dropped us off. It took him hours to find a charging station. The second it had power, he came right back for us."

Tears pricked my eyes.

Earlier this year, Julian had driven Maya and me to a nearby city for the weekend.

On the way back, they used that exact excuse to ditch me at a highway rest stop.

I still remembered the smug smirks on their faces:

"Who told you to be so gullible? If you can't see your car at a rest stop, you should be on high alert. Consider it a life lesson!"

Egging each other on, they genuinely left me behind.

It was the dead of winter.

I sat on a cold plastic bench inside the rest stop, shivering until my limbs went numb.

I waited until dawn before a kind stranger gave me a lift.

When I finally got home, I came down with a fever that lasted three days.

Julian nursed me, apologizing through tears:

"I’m sorry, Chloe. I really didn’t want to, but I honestly couldn't find anything else that made me feel alive anymore."

During the years we spent together, keeping him happy had become the center of my universe.

He hadn't always been like this.

Back when he first struggled, he would read, attend therapy sessions, and sometimes invite me on hikes.

He never took his dark moods out on me.

He used to tell me:

"I’m going to get better for you."

Everything changed the moment Maya moved back from abroad.

She started pushing him to find entertainment at other people’s expense—starting with people she hated, and eventually moving on to me.

Julian’s mood genuinely seemed to improve.

So cruelty became Maya’s go-to excuse to torture me.

Noticing my anger, Julian rushed over to apologize:

"I'm sorry. I swear I didn't mean to strand them out here. Things just played out that way, so I thought I’d turn it into a harmless joke..."

His lips offered apologies, but his eyes were filled with genuine confusion.

Compared to what they’d done before, this seemed minor to him. He couldn’t fathom why I was this upset.

He reached out to hold my hand:

"It’s only a forty-minute drive back. We can still blow out the candles. I bought your favorite cake. Please don't be mad at me, okay?"

Before the words fully left his mouth, a figure rustled out from the tall grass nearby.

Maya stepped forward with a camcorder, laughing hysterically:

"You're a natural, Julian! You took my rough idea and pulled it off perfectly! I recorded the whole thing. If I post this online, it's going to go viral!"

Her words jogged a sickening memory. They kept a scrapbook documenting every prank, a little memory journal.

Most entries featured me looking humiliated.

The cover read: "Julian & Maya’s Precious Memories."

I had felt sick the first time I saw it.

Maya had merely brushed it off with a casual excuse:

"I can't be with him twenty-four seven. Looking through these when he's alone is therapeutic for him."

I didn’t want to argue about that damn scrapbook right now.

I just wanted to know why he lied.

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I demanded, "Why is she here?"

He had promised me. He knew how much I had looked forward to this birthday.

He hadn’t let Maya pull the prank on me.

He had simply pulled it himself.

Julian stared at me, his eyes finally showing a flicker of panic:

"She was bored at home alone today, so I... I brought her along..."

The night wind was freezing.

Yet it was nowhere near as cold as my heart.