She had never noticed it—not once in all the years they’d known each other. Never noticed the way Tom looked at her a second too long when she laughed, or how his eyes searched for her first in every room, or how his shoulders visibly relaxed whenever she walked through the door. Maybe it was because Tom had always been Tom—constant, familiar, permanent. While other boys their age stumbled through immaturity and temporary feelings, Tom had always felt older somehow, steadier, carrying a quiet kind of maturity that made everyone else seem loud and careless beside him. At nineteen, standing at an unfair six-foot-four, he’d long outgrown the awkwardness most people still carried; there was something calm about him, something patient. And maybe that was his mistake. Because while she, at eighteen, fell hard and healed slowly and chased feelings with her whole heart, Tom stood silently at the edge of it all, yearning in ways she never saw. He watched, waited, picked up the pieces when others let them fall—and now, after years of standing on the sidelines, Tom wanted his shot.