I spent months chasing Garrett. Eventually, he grew so sick of me that he lied, claiming he was at a ski resort twelve hundred miles away in the snow-choked mountains of Montana. I went. And the mountain gave way. Trapped beneath the crush of the avalanche, barely breathing in the dark, my phone vibrated. Garrett’s voice came through the speaker, sharp and mocking: "You actually went? You seriously couldn’t tell I was fucking with you?" "So... you’re not here," I whispered, the air freezing on my lips as I forced the words out. "Thank God..." Thank God you’re safe. Thank God you never agreed to take me back. That way, when I die out here, you won’t have to grieve... 1 When I opened my eyes, there was only blackness. The silence around me was absolute, heavy and suffocating. I was wedged into a crushed pocket of space between the crumpled frame of an SUV and a wall of compacted snow, unable to move an inch. I blinked, and something warm trickled past the corner of my eye. Blood. Then the memory hit me—the deafening roar, the tidal wave of white that slammed me violently against the car door, the sickening crack against my skull. An avalanche. Why was I here again? Right. I had come looking for Garrett. Over the past few months, I had been pursuing him—quite literally. Wherever he went, I found a way to track him down. After dodging me countless times, he finally picked up the phone. "Hello? Is this Garrett Mercer?" Blaring rock music bled through the receiver, but it couldn't drown out the venom in his voice: "Simon, what the fuck do you actually want from me?" My fingers tightened around the phone until my knuckles turned white. "I want to be with you," I said softly, in complete earnest. "I want to date you." "Jesus Christ." He let out a cold, humorless laugh. "Are you out of your goddamn mind?" I shook my head, then remembered he couldn't see me. "No," I answered slowly. "I'm not." "Where are you? I'll come find you." A beat of silence hung on the line, taut with exhausted exasperation. "I’m at the ski resort in Big Sky. Come find me if you’ve got the guts." Before I could even finish saying Okay, the line went dead. My mind drifted back to the dark, frozen present. A sudden, sharp panic pierced through the numbness in my chest. Garrett. Did the avalanche catch him too? Was he buried somewhere out here, freezing in the sub-zero wind just like me? My limbs were stiffening. In the cramped, icy hollow beneath the wreckage, I fumbled for my phone. The screen flickered to life, the battery drained to a hairline sliver of red. Suddenly, the screen lit up with Garrett’s name. "You actually went?" his voice barked through the receiver. "You seriously couldn’t tell I was fucking with you?" I couldn't form words. My breath hit the microphone in ragged, shuddering gasps. He paused for a second, his tone dropping into something quiet and cutting. "Simon, you really are an idiot." The reality sank in. Swallowing down the raw, stabbing agony in my chest, I whispered, "So... you're not here." My breath crystallized in the air. I forced the frozen corners of my mouth into a faint, stiff smile. "Thank God..." Thank God you're safe. Thank God you never gave in to me. "What did you say?" he demanded. My muscles were seizing in violent tremors. Every word I tried to push past my teeth shook uncontrollably. He couldn't hear me clearly. The blood loss and the brutal cold were pulling a dark curtain over my consciousness. My frost-tipped eyelashes fluttered once, twice, and then my eyelids slipped shut. "It’s so cold..." I breathed, barely a murmur. There was a slight hesitation on the line before Garrett’s voice hardened again. "Simon, stop playing the victim. You brought this on yourself." A dull, throbbing pain flared at the back of my head, and fragmented memories suddenly rushed in like a tidal surge. A vast, pristine expanse of white, where Garrett knelt in the snow to carve out the letters of my name. The warmth of his woolen scarf wrapping us together, pulling me flush against his chest. His voice, entirely devoid of the cruelty it held now, murmuring gently against my ear: Simon, don't you ever leave me... I blinked slowly into the darkness and spoke into the phone: "Garrett... we used to be in love, didn't we?" No answer came. I tilted my head stiffly and saw the phone screen had gone completely black. I didn't know if he heard my last question. We were together once, I thought. We had to be. Otherwise, why would his deceit make my heart ache so terribly? I wished I could have looked him in the eye and asked him in person. If only I had survived. 2 Gradually, the biting cold began to recede. A strange, soothing warmth settled over my limbs. Did someone find me already? With my eyes closed, I thought: The moment they get me out of here, I'm going straight back to Garrett. I need to know if we really loved each other. And why we ever fell apart. I lingered on that thought for a long time until my body felt weightless, light as air. When I opened my eyes again, I was standing directly in front of him. The perspective was painfully familiar. So was the man in front of me. He was staring down at his phone, his sharp, handsome brow knitted into a deep scowl. "Garrett," I called out softly. He locked the screen and looked up. Garrett was half-European, with close-cropped dark hair and striking, storm-gray eyes. But right now, those gray eyes looked straight through me. He couldn't hear me. He couldn't see me. I reached out to touch him, only to watch my fingers slip effortlessly through his heavy black leather jacket and his chest. Is this a dream? Or am I already dead? On second thought, it didn't really matter. I studied the familiar contours of his face for a quiet moment and asked, "Why did we break up?" Garrett didn't answer. He simply looked down at his screen and blocked my number. "Simon, just don't let me see your face again. I'm sick of it..." I lowered my gaze, a quiet realization settling over me: You won't have to. I think I'm already gone. Would he feel relieved if he knew? I must have done something unforgivable to make him hate me this much. But what was it? My memories were like scratched, degraded film reels, refusing to play the crucial scenes. A knock broke the silence. Austin, Garrett’s assistant, pushed the door open. "Garrett, time to suit up. The car is prepped." Garrett nodded and turned toward the locker room. In one fluid motion, he pulled his black hoodie over his head. The hem of his undershirt rode up with it, exposing the taut, lean lines of his torso. He glanced back, his expression flat and dismissive. "Wait outside." Austin’s ears flushed slightly, and he let out an awkward chuckle. "Man, people were saying you still wear the pendant your ex gave you. Is that it?" Given Garrett’s notorious temper and the cold arrogance the press constantly criticized him for, I expected him to snap—something along the lines of Mind your own business or Get the hell out. Instead, he looked down, his gaze following Austin's toward his chest. He caught the small, smooth white stone pendant hanging from a crimson cord, and with a single, sharp tug, ripped it from his neck. His eyes were completely devoid of emotion. "You like it? Take it." The polished stone swung gently between his fingers. As I stared at it, a faded memory suddenly snapped into focus. I had given him that pendant. Right before his first major championship race, I had looped that red cord over his head. “It’s a talisman,” I had told him, smiling. “To keep you safe.” Garrett had glanced down at it with a dry smirk. “Superstitious nonsense.” Yet he never took it off. Instead, he had pulled me into a fierce, breathless hug. The stone had been cold at first, pressed between our pounding chests, until our shared heat warmed it through. Back then, I told him I had braided the cord myself. What I never told him was that the small white stone was the only thing left with me in the basket on the group home's doorstep when I was abandoned as an infant. It was the only trace of my birth parents I possessed. "Please don't give it away..." A sudden ache gripped my chest, as if my very soul were suspended in Garrett’s careless hand, waiting to shatter. I stepped directly in front of him, pleading, "If you don't want it anymore, just give it back to me." Austin took a step closer, hesitant. "Are you sure, man? Word was you two were really in love." "It was never love. Just a stray kid who followed me around when we were young." Garrett’s lips parted casually, but the words felt like they were chewing me to pieces. Austin let out a relieved laugh. "Well, thanks then." Garrett opened his hand. The pendant slipped right through my outstretched, desperate palm and dropped into Austin’s grip. Without a backward glance, Garrett walked away. I stood frozen in the center of the room, watching in horror as Austin carried the pendant over to the window and tossed it carelessly into the swimming pool in the courtyard below. "No!" I lunged forward, throwing myself out the window and into the water after it. Not a single ripple stirred the surface. The icy blue water passed right through me, creating an impassable gulf between my transparent hands and the small white stone sinking to the tiled bottom. A reflection in water, a shadow in the air—in this world, I was the only thing that wasn't real. Now, I had nothing left. A phantom chill pierced me, sharp as ten thousand needles. I hadn't known a soul could still feel cold, or that a spirit could still ache. Garrett. I regret giving it to you. 3 Garrett emerged from the locker room clad in his tailored, flame-retardant racing suit. With his helmet tucked under one arm, his sharp, striking features carried their usual fierce, unyielding edge. The television in the lounge was on. The pre-race broadcast was abruptly cut short by a breaking news banner: “An earthquake struck the mountain region near Big Sky an hour ago, triggering massive avalanches near several popular ski resorts.” Garrett’s footsteps halted. He turned toward the screen. “Search and rescue teams have already deployed to the disaster zone. Casualties—” Click. Austin shut off the TV with the remote, offering an apologetic grimace. "We're running out of time, Garrett. We have to head to the grid." Garrett glanced down at his phone, his jaw tight, before turning on his heel and striding out. I didn't know if anyone had found my body yet beneath the snow. I wanted to go back and look, but an invisible, tethering force dragged me along in Garrett’s wake, keeping me glued to his side. I watched him put on his helmet amid the roar and screams of the crowd, strapping himself into the cockpit of his car. The engines erupted in a chorus of mechanical fury, the pack tearing onto the asphalt like rabid beasts. Garrett wasn't leading the pack like he usually did. Standing in the pit lane, I heard the crew members whispering among themselves: "Something's off with Garrett today..." The words had barely left their mouths when Garrett’s car clipped the barrier on turn four. The vehicle spun violently out of control, careening off the track, flipping twice across the grass before coming to a smoking halt in the infield. Amid the collective gasp of the grandstands, Garrett kicked the warped door open and dragged himself out. He had lost the race. His name sat dead last on the leaderboard—an unprecedented humiliation in his career. Yet the strangest part wasn't the crash itself. It was the fact that he didn't explode in fury. Back in the team trailer, the medic carefully wrapped the lacerations along his forearm. Garrett held his phone in his left hand, tapping stiffly at the screen. Suddenly, he hurled the device across the room, smashing it to pieces against the far wall. I drifted over. Through the spiderweb cracks of the shattered screen, I could see the browser results—every top headline was dominated by his catastrophic crash. He still cared. Racing was the only thing he had ever poured his entire soul into. In the scattered fragments of my memory, I remembered times when he had been this furious before. Back then, I had always stayed right by his side. Unlike the people who gossiped behind his back or shrank away from his volatile temper, I had stood firmly in his storm. I was like a reckless cloud wrapping itself around a rumbling volcano, desperate to soothe the molten rage before it could consume him. When we were boys in the group home, I would sit beside him on the steps and say, “I believe in you.” I would say, “It’s okay.” Later, when we grew up, the setting changed, but the rhythm remained. I would bury my face into the crook of his neck, whispering, “Don't worry. I'll help you. We're going to be together forever...” Now, he would never hear those words again. No one dared approach him when he was like this. "You idiot," I whispered, looking at him sitting entirely alone. It was the first time I had ever scolded him. "It's your own fault. You lost your talisman." No one came to comfort him. Garrett sat in the heavy silence, his chest heaving with shallow, ragged breaths. Austin stepped into the trailer, holding a phone to his ear, his voice cautious: "Garrett, someone's outside asking to see you. He says—" "Tell him to fuck off!" Garrett snapped, though the tension in his brow eased slightly. "He sure made it back fast." "Who made it back?" Austin asked, confused. "It’s a guy named Dr. Harris. He says he's a neurologist from the city hospital, and he needs to talk to you about Simon." 4 I searched the fog of my mind for any memory of a doctor. Faint, scattered images flickered into view. A man in a white coat looking at a series of brain scans, turning to me: “Are you starting to remember anything?” I had shaken my head. His voice had been gentle: “Don't be discouraged. If we stick to the medication, there’s still a chance the neural pathways will recover.” I had looked down at my hands, feeling hopeless: “I keep forgetting whether I’ve even taken the pills...” “That’s okay,” he had replied. “I can text you a reminder every morning.” ... I began drifting toward the door, thinking that if I saw the doctor’s face, I might finally understand what had been wrong with me. Garrett hadn't moved. Instead, a harsh, mocking scoff broke from his throat. "Ha. So he moved on to a doctor." I froze in place. The words struck like a bullet straight through the center of my chest. When the pain bloomed outward, I turned to stare at Garrett in stunned disbelief. Is that what I was to you? Someone so shallow? The memories I cherished like sacred relics were nothing more than stains in his eyes. "Tell him to get lost." Garrett clenched his fists so tightly the fresh gauze began to seep crimson. Every syllable was forced through grinding teeth: "I have nothing to say to him." When Garrett left the paddock, he was immediately swarmed by reporters and flashing cameras. Just as he reached the team SUV, a man broke through the crowd and threw his hand against the car door, blocking it. "Mr. Mercer! I need two minutes. This is critical!" Garrett adjusted his sunglasses, his jaw set like iron. "Who the hell are you?" "I'm Dr. Harris from the university medical center. I'm Simon’s physician—and his friend." "Get out of my way," Garrett snarled. "I don't ever want to hear his name again." "Then tell me where he is!" Garrett froze mid-motion, his expression turning stony. "I don't know." I couldn't understand why Garrett would lie. He was cutting off the only person who was actually looking for me. Dr. Harris’s voice rose with urgent desperation: "He needs constant care! He cannot be left on his own right now!" Garrett let out a cold, cynical laugh, his tone dripping with provocation: "Treat him like a child or a senile old man for all I care. Just get out of my damn sight." Dr. Harris didn't flinch. He simply looked at Garrett with a gaze full of profound, sorrowful disgust. "He was so good to you. How did someone like him ever fall in love with someone like you?" Right. Earlier, I had wanted to know why Garrett and I broke up. Now, standing here, I wondered why I had ever loved him in the first place. Garrett’s breath hitched, turning harsh and shallow. He stepped out of the vehicle, grabbing Dr. Harris by the lapels and slamming him back against the chassis. "I may be an asshole," Garrett spat through clenched teeth, "but I never wronged Simon. Not once!" "He's right!" Austin shouted, shoving himself between them. "Simon was the one stalking him! He's the one who dumped Garrett out of nowhere, and then kept crawling back playing innocent! Garrett’s the victim here!" The murmur of the press corps rose, shutter clicks firing like automatic rifles. “Mercer did publicly acknowledge a partner he grew up with in the foster system...” “Yeah, but after he won the championship last year, they vanished from the public eye.” “Word on the circuit was the ex moved on to someone richer—said racing was too dangerous and didn't want to end up stuck with a dead driver...” Championship. Breakup. Those two words pierced my skull like hot needles. The lock inside my head gave way, unleashing a torrent of fragmented memories that swirled violently into focus. The agony was blinding. I fell to my knees on the pavement, clutching my head, crying out into the void where no one could hear me: "No, that's not true... I didn't... I wasn't playing games, and I never betrayed you! I did it because—" "A car crash!" Dr. Harris’s roar tore through the noise of the crowd. He stared directly into Garrett’s stunned eyes, pronouncing every single word like a death sentence: "One year ago, on his way to your championship race, Simon was in a catastrophic car accident!" The chaos of the world went dead silent. The ambient noise vanished until all I could hear was Garrett’s ragged, shallow breathing. The background blurred into nothingness. The only sharp image remaining was Garrett’s face—drained of every last drop of color. Tears spilled over my cheeks, and a silent, bitter laugh broke from my lips. Garrett. I remember now. I remember everything. 5 When the rideshare was T-boned and flipped across the intersection, I had been sitting in the backseat, clutching a small velvet ring box, silently rehearsing how I would slide the ring onto Garrett’s finger after his victory. The impact was deafening. The ring and the box were thrown from the wreckage into the street, never to be found. For a long time after I woke up in the trauma ward, my memory was shattered into disconnected, erratic pieces. Dr. Harris was my primary neurologist. He showed me the scans, explaining that an inoperable subdural hematoma was pressing against critical memory and cognitive centers. Surgery carried an extreme mortality risk. A conservative pharmacological approach was safer, but it came with a terrifying cost: progressive, degenerative memory loss that mirrored the early stages of dementia. Piecing together the fragments of who I was, I arrived at a single, absolute certainty: I loved Garrett more than my own life. And so, I chose to end things. I had once promised him I would never lie to him. But that day on the phone, I lied through my teeth. I told him I didn't want to grow old with him anymore. I told him I didn't love him. Garrett had stayed silent on the other end for a long, terrible moment before asking in a raspy, hollow voice: “What did you just say?” Just like he was asking now. Garrett stared at Dr. Harris, his voice trembling, demanding confirmation: "What do you mean?" "Simon was in an accident the day you took the podium," Dr. Harris said softly, his eyes heavy with sorrow. "He suffered severe neurological trauma. He broke things off with you because he refused to drag you down with him into a slow, humiliating decline." Dr. Harris held Garrett’s gaze. "Garrett, you knew absolutely nothing." Garrett’s brow furrowed in desperate denial, his pale lips trembling. "That's impossible. When I saw him, he didn't look sick. Don't feed me some melodramatic bullshit. I don't buy it." Dr. Harris wrenched his arm free from Garrett’s grip. "I hope to God you don't live to regret this, Mercer." I watched Dr. Harris walk away through the thinning crowd. He won't regret it, I thought quietly. Garrett was far too proud. He was so proud that a year ago, it had taken him only three seconds to find the sharpest words to wound me back. When I had forced out the word “breakup” through my tears, my heart had seized with instant, overwhelming regret. I almost took it back. But before I could, his cold voice cut through the line: “Good thing you said it first.” “Same here.” The dial tone had sounded, and my heart had slowed, sinking like a stone into dark water. Garrett loved to win. He always won. He won when we broke up, and he won today. Yet right now, his face was ashen, drained of every ounce of the fierce arrogance that used to define him. The driver pulled the SUV up to the gates of Garrett’s modern home. Austin opened the passenger door. "We're home, Garrett." He handed Garrett a replacement phone. "I transferred your SIM card over already." Garrett had pulled the hood of his sweatshirt low over his face, slumped motionless against the leather seat. "Garrett?" He blinked, pulling himself back from whatever dark place he was trapped in, and took the phone. "Thanks." Inside the quiet house, Garrett placed the new phone on the glass coffee table. I stood across from him, watching as his lips parted and he spoke my name into the empty air: "Simon." My chest contracted sharply. My eyes widened, half-believing for a second that he could actually see me. But he was just staring intently at the silent phone. "If you call right now," he whispered to the screen, "I'll give you one last chance to explain." He hadn't completely dismissed Dr. Harris’s words. He was always like this. The hard, impenetrable armor was only on the surface. If I hadn't known that vulnerable boy beneath it since we were children, I never would have fallen in love with him. I drifted closer, tilting my head to study his pale face. "Are you waiting for my call?" I asked softly. With the new phone, my unblocked number could reach him again. But I would never call him. Not unless— The phone on the table suddenly erupted into a shrill ring. Both of us jumped at the sound. Have they found my body?
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